I thank Charles E. Feinberg, prince of Whitman collectors; Gay Wilson Allen and Edwin Haviland Miller, whose work has set the standard for all subsequent Whitman scholarship; and Gordon N. Ray and the trustees of the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for the award of a fellowship in aid of this biography.
For help and generosity with information and materials of one sort or another I am grateful to the late Frederick Anderson, E. Digby Baltzell, John B. Blake, Stella Blum, David Cavitch, Heather Cole, James M. Cox, Julie Cummings, George Gloss, David R. Godine, David Gollaher, Edward F. Grier, Patrick D. Hazard, Howard Mumford Jones, Jerome Loving, Frank McQuilkin, Robert K. Martin, Tom Maschler, Paddington Matz, Robert F. W. Meader, Edwin Haviland Miller, Henry A. Murray, Donald Newlove, Stephen B. Oates, James Parton, Joel Porte, John H. Reed, Charlotte Sagoff, Robert J. Scholnick, Peter Shaw, Lola Sladitz, Henry Nash Smith, Irene A. Talarowski, Stanley Tamarkin, Randall Waldron, and Alden Whitman.
I could not have written this book without drawing on the resources of the Berg Collection, New York Public Library; Harvard University Library; Manuscript Division, Library of Congress (the chief repository of Whitman materials, including the Feinberg Collection); Long Island Historical Society; Special Collections, Ohio Wesleyan University.
Two mentors no longer living, F. O. Matthiessen and Louis Untermeyer, helped shape my interest in Whitman many years ago. I salute them, and for more recent counsel and encouragement I thank Daniel Aaron, Michael Korda, and, always, Anne Bernays.
J.K.
Cambridge, Massachusetts
February 29, 1980