Poet at Work: Recovered Notebooks from the Thomas Biggs Harned Walt Whitman Collection

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The four early notebooks in the Walt Whitman Notebooks,1847-1860s collection contain fragments of the poem "Song of Myself," trial lines of poetry and prose, Civil War hospital notes, and personal jottings on a wide range of subjects. The notebooks and a cardboard butterfly were returned to the Library of Congress in 1995, fifty years after they mysteriously disappeared from the Library's manuscript collections.

The patient student will have greater success using this collection. There is no search function, table of contents, or index to the notebooks. Rather, a page turner allows the user to browse the notebooks one page at a time. However, the Learn More About It documents present the notebooks in terms of their historical and literary subjects and provide numerous links to specific passages. Though Whitman's handwriting is legible, some words and sections are difficult to decipher.

LC's Missing Whitman Notes Found in N.Y.
Library Scans Whitman Items; Preserves Them
Conserving the Whitman Notebooks
Notebooks lost in 1942 and found in 1995

The Civil War and Reconstruction, 1850-1877

African American Perspectives, 1818-1907
American Life Histories, 1936-1940
Civil War Photographs, 1861-1865
Evolution of the Conservation Movement, 1850-1920
Touring Turn-of-the-Century America, 1880-1920
Words and Deeds in American History

Read More About It! - A bibliography

The Walt Whitman notebooks are not searchable. The notebook pages appear just as Whitman wrote them, with no table of contents or index. Because there is no subject index for the collection, a page turner function has been added to help you browse the notebooks.

The Learn More About It documents present the notebooks in terms of their historical and literary subjects and provide links to specific passages.

For help with general search strategies, see Finding Items in American Memory.

You do not need any special viewers to see the page images in this collection.