A lost Walt Whitman novel has been discovered in the archives of a long defunct New York newspaper.
“The Life and Adventures of Jack Engle” – a rags to riches tale published anonymously in 1852 as a serial in the New York Sunday Dispatch — matches a lengthy synopsis found in the late poet’s notebooks that scholars thought was forever lost.
Zachary Turpin, a doctoral candidate from the University of Houston, made the discovery while doing a deep dive of the famed author’s “odds and ends” in the Integrated Catalog of Walt Whitman’s Literary Manuscripts — a complete list of all the poet’s surviving papers, jottings, drafts, scraps and notebooks.
He found a small advertisement for the series in the New York Daily Times — which became the modern day New York Times — and the name Jack Engle matched up with notes found in Whitman’s archives.
Turpin is the same researcher that discovered Whitman’s lost “Manly Health” guide.
The novel has been published for free online by the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review. Ed Folsom, the journal’s editor, said the discovery is “momentous” because it challenges everything scholars previously knew about Whitman’s relationship with fiction, and move to poetry.
“Now the writer who until today seemed to have written only one novel (Franklin Evans, 1842) actually wrote (at least) two,” Folsom wrote.
“The writer who seemed to simply give up fiction in 1848 when his last known short story was published actually continued to publish fiction up to (at least) 1852.”
The researcher who discovered the book described it as a “fun, rollicking, creative, twisty, bizarre little book” about corrupt lawyer that tries to trick his orphan ward out of her inheritance. Hero Jack Engle –an orphan works for the lawyer — swoops in to help the disadvantaged girl and realizes their fates are intertwined.
It was published anonymously in six parts between March 14, 1852 and April 18, 1852.
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