Life and Adventures of Jack Engle: An Auto-Biography; A Story of New York at the Present Time in which the Reader Will Find Some Familiar Characters
Walt Whitman
May 2017 · Penguin Random House Audio · Narrated by Jon Hamm
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3 hr 55 min
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About this audiobook
In 1852, young Walt Whitman—a down-on-his-luck housebuilder in Brooklyn—was hard at work writing two books. One would become one of the most famous volumes of poetry in American history, a free-verse revelation beloved the world over, Leaves of Grass. The other, a novel, would be published under a pseudonym and serialized in a newspaper. A short, rollicking story of orphanhood, avarice, and adventure in New York City, Life and Adventures of Jack Engle appeared to little fanfare.
Then it disappeared.
No one laid eyes on it until 2016, when literary scholar Zachary Turpin, University of Houston, followed a paper trail deep into the Library of Congress, where the sole surviving copy of Jack Engle has lain waiting for generations. Now, after more than 160 years, the University of Iowa Press is honored to reprint this lost work, restoring a missing piece of American literature by one of the world’s greatest authors, written as he verged on immortality.
Read by Jon Hamm, with an afterword written and read by Zachary Turpin
Then it disappeared.
No one laid eyes on it until 2016, when literary scholar Zachary Turpin, University of Houston, followed a paper trail deep into the Library of Congress, where the sole surviving copy of Jack Engle has lain waiting for generations. Now, after more than 160 years, the University of Iowa Press is honored to reprint this lost work, restoring a missing piece of American literature by one of the world’s greatest authors, written as he verged on immortality.
Read by Jon Hamm, with an afterword written and read by Zachary Turpin
About the author
Walt Whitman was born on May 31, 1819, near Huntington, Long Island, New York. On July 4, 1855, the first edition of Leaves of Grass, the volume of poems that for the next four decades would become his lifes work, was placed on sale. Although some critics treated the volume as a joke and others were outraged by its unprecedented mixture of mysticism and earthiness, the book attracted the attention of some of the finest literary intelligences. His poetry slowly achieved a wide readership in America and in England, where he was praised by Swinburne and Tennyson. (D. H. Lawrence later referred to Whitman as the"greatest modern poet, and"the greatest of Americans. Whitman suffered a stroke in 1873 and was forced to retire to Camden, New Jersey, where he would spend the last twenty years of his life. There he continued to write poetry, and in 1881 the seventh edition of Leaves of Grass was published to generally favorable reviews. However, the book was soon banned in Boston on the grounds that it was obscene literature. In January 1892 the final edition of Leaves of Grass appeared on sale, and Whitman's life work was complete. He died two months later on the evening of March 26, 1892, and was buried four days afterward at Harleigh Cemetery in Camden.
Zachary Turpin is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Houston. With interests in nineteenth-century periodical culture and digital humanities, he has uncovered lost works by a number of American authors, including Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Emma Lazarus, Rebecca Harding Davis, Ambrose Bierce, and L. Frank Baum. He lives with his family in Houston, Texas.
Zachary Turpin is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Houston. With interests in nineteenth-century periodical culture and digital humanities, he has uncovered lost works by a number of American authors, including Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Emma Lazarus, Rebecca Harding Davis, Ambrose Bierce, and L. Frank Baum. He lives with his family in Houston, Texas.
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