Texas graduate student discovers a Walt Whitman novel lost for more than 150 years
Source: Washington Post
Texas graduate student discovers a Walt Whitman novel lost for more than 150 years
By Travis M. Andrews February 22 at 4:48 AM
For a month, Zachary Turpin would sit there night after night, buzzing. ... The graduate student at the University of Houston had spent the past few years digging through the digitized papers of American writer Walt Whitman, which contain 40 to 50 years worth of his personal notes. He was more or less a hoarder, Turpin told The Washington Post during a phone interview.
....
Turpins mission was to find any undiscovered works by Whitman. Day after day, he pored over the papers, checking certain key words against old publications, hoping to find some match, some hint of an unearthed Whitman work. After all, he often published fiction and journalism without his own byline, which Turpin thinks was a method of protecting his poet persona. ... But the work was going slowly.
....
Thus his excitement when he stumbled upon a small advertisement appearing in the New York Daily Times on March 13, 1852, for an upcoming serialized novel titled the Life and Adventures of Jack Engle to be published in the Sunday Dispatch.
(Courtesy the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review)
A month passed, and he found himself at his in-laws home when his phone lit up an email. Sure enough, it was a PDF from the Library of Congress, the document he had been anxiously awaiting. ... Tingling, he opened it. ... What I saw was all those unique, offbeat character names, Wigglesworth, Smytthe and Jack Engle, he said. That was the moment I knew it was something. ... Immediately, I said some unprincipled words, and I immediately told my wife, he said, pausing. Well, I sort of couldnt get words out, so she asked, Good or bad? And I said, Good. ... In fact, he had discovered a 36,000-word novel written by Whitman during the same time period the poet was penning Leaves of Grass, published in 1855. The novels full title: Life and Adventures of Jack Engle: An Auto-Biography (A Story of New York at the Present Time).
....
On Monday, the book was published in full* by the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review and is available as a book from the University of Iowa Press.** ... Read the entirety of Whitmans lost novel here.***
* http://ir.uiowa.edu/wwqr/
** https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01N4SQYS0
*** http://ir.uiowa.edu/wwqr/
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/02/22/texas-graduate-student-discovers-a-walt-whitman-novel-lost-for-more-than-150-years/
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ETA: correct links to U of Iowa journal, the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review. You can go to the article from that link.
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this is one of my favorite poems 
Welcome to DU.
Well done! 
I'm going to pass this on to my HS English teachers.
I love stories like this and literary mysteries, and the serendipity of the right person getting the material to research at the right time. It's not an exact parallel, but it reminds me of all those New Amsterdam papers being discovered, but they were in a language no one could read - Medieval Dutch. But there was one fresh college graduate who'd actually studied the language and was looking for a job and they hooked up (this is all described in Russell Shorter's "Island in the Center of the World"
. I actually envy Zachary Turpin (in a good way), because I would love to do similar, rewarding type of work like this.
