Bohemian Bureaucrat: Making Sense of Walt Whitman’s Scribal Documents

The essay presented here served as the presidential address at the Society for Textual Scholarship conference held at the University of Maryland, College Park, June 1, 2017. It considers the implications for editing and criticism of Walt Whitman of the fairly recent discovery of approximately 3,000 documents in his handwriting produced when he was clerk in the Attorney General’s Office. For the most part, I have retained the tone and relative informality of a spoken presentation; I have also retained references to topical events.