Whitman's Southern Sojourn by Stefan Schoberlein

£28.00
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9781685970475
Published:
16 Dec 2025
Format:
Paperback
Number of pages:
300 pages
Weight:
0.000kgs
"Description: For more than a century, Walt Whitman's short stay in New Orleans in the spring of 1848 has been cast as a crucial moment in his development as a poet, a journalist, and an American in full. There to get a brand-new newspaper off the ground, the Daily Crescent, Whitman and his brother Jeff anticipated spending the months working together alongside a colorful cast of newsmen, and that they certainly did. But in exploring the nation's most visibly multiracial city, seeing its sights, meeting its people, learning their history, and connecting them and himself, in print, to major shifts then roiling national politics, Whitman fundamentally changed. His "southern sojourn," already a core component of biographical narratives of the poet, revealed to himself and reveals to readers today surprising, often contradictory sides of the man who would become one of the greatest of American poets. Yet despite the importance of this exper
Walt Whitman's 1848 stint in New Orleans was a crucial moment of development for the poet. Working for The Daily Crescent, a new local newspaper, Whitman spent his days strolling through the multiracial city and turning his impressions into prose sketches, news items, and fiery editorials. While in the southern metropolis, the young journalist brushed shoulders with American soldiers returning from Mexico, cheered on European revolutions in the French Quarter, and explored raunchy performances at the St. Charles Theatre. Yet 1848 was also the year Whitman began lobbying for "Free Soil," after encountering in New Orleans, Creole citizens, enslaved Black people, and the slaveholder who would become America's next president.

Far from some brief escape, New Orleans was a significant milestone in Whitman's development as a political firebrand, as well as a major step for a professional journalist on the rise. Through a wealth of new texts, contexts, and personalities, Stefan Schöberlein and Zachary Turpin paint a vivid picture of a writer on the verge of Leaves of Grass, embracing the contradictions and the multitudes of New Orleans.
 

About the Author: Stefan Schöberlein is associate professor of English at Texas A&M University-Central Texas. He is author of Writing the Brain: Material Minds and Literature, 1800-1880, among others. He lives in Georgetown, Texas. Zachary Turpin is associate professor of American literature at the University of Idaho. He is coeditor of Every Hour, Every Atom: A Collection of Walt Whitman's Early Notebooks and Fragments (Iowa, 2020), among others. He lives in Moscow, Idaho.

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Number of pages 300

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