CALAMUS. A SERIES OF LETTERS WRITTEN DURING THE YEARS 1868-1880 BY WALT WHITMAN TO A YOUNG FRIEND (PETER DOYLE)

Boston: Laurens Maynard, 1897. First Edition. Hardcover. Pages a little toned, frontispiece and facsimile letter browned, as nearly always the case. Original green cloth. Edited with an introduction by Richard Maurice Bucke, one of Whitman's literary executors. BAL 21446: Issue A; Meyerson A14.I.b1. Illustrated with a portrait of Whitman with Doyle and a facsimile of a Whitman letter. This book marks the first separate publication (outside of LEAVES OF GRASS) of Whitman's Calamus poems devoted to male romantic relationships. INSCRIBED and SIGNED by another of Whitman's literary executors, Thomas B. Harned, on 9 January 1898 to renowned author Mary Mapes Dodge, the recognized leader in juvenile literature for almost a third of the nineteenth century. For more than 30 years Dodge edited ST. NICHOLAS MAGAZINE, the primary magazine for children at the time. She also wrote the classic HANS BRINKER, OR THE SILVER SKATES.