Life And Adventures Of Jack Engle: An Auto- Biography; In which the reader will find some familiar characters - Softcover

Whitman, Walt

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1544229275 ISBN 13: 9781544229270

Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2017

Synopsis

WALT WHITMAN'S LOST NOVEL

Life and Adventures of Jack Engle: An Auto-Biography; in Which the Reader Will Find Some Familiar Characters is a city mystery novel by Walt Whitman. It was first published anonymously in serial form in the newspaper the New York Sunday Dispatch from March 14 to April 18, 1852.

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, boisterous story of orphanhood, avarice, and adventure in New York City, Life and Adventures of Jack Engle appeared to little fanfare. Then it disappeared.

Now, after more than 160 years, Walt Whitman's lost novel is being printed again.

The novel which challenges previously held ideas about the American poet’s transition from prose to poetry has been described by it's discoverer, Zachary Turpin, as “a fun, rollicking, creative, twisty, bizarre little book”. Jack Engle is a classic rags-to-riches orphan’s story about a corrupt lawyer, Mr Covert, who tries to trick his ward Martha out of her inheritance. Jack, who works for Covert, sets out to save his fellow orphan and in the process discovers his fate is tied up with hers.

Ed Folsom of the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review agreed the novel revealed Whitman’s struggle with form and that it gives a precise time for his move into poetry. In chapter 19, the plot comes to an abrupt end as Jack wanders through a graveyard and the plots of the buried merge into endless lost life stories. As he contemplates these lost plots, Jack feel the grass covering his own face. Folsom said: “I sense at this moment Whitman is discovering why conventional plots will no longer serve for the kind of writing he feels he has to accomplish, and this novel thus lets us experience the moment in the process of Whitman’s development when he realises fiction simply will not serve the kind of creative work he will devote the rest of his life to.”

About this edition

• Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1544229275
• ISBN 13: 9781544229270
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 98