The Papyrus Club was a literary organization in Boston, Massachusetts. Founded in 1872, and existing until approximately 1923, the Club contained and hosted many of the great literary, and journalistic minds of its time, including Robert Benchley, Mark Twain and Walt Whitman.
The society organized Whitman's April 15, 1881 lecture on the death of Abraham Lincoln. [1]
Walter Whitman was an American poet, essayist and journalist. A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works. Whitman is among the most influential poets in the American canon, often called the father of free verse. His work was controversial in its time, particularly his 1855 poetry collection Leaves of Grass, which was described as obscene for its overt sensuality.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist, entrepreneur, publisher, and lecturer. He was lauded as the "greatest humorist the United States has produced", and William Faulkner called him "the father of American literature". His novels include The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), the latter of which has often been called the "Great American Novel".
Leaves of Grass is a poetry collection by American poet Walt Whitman. Though it was first published in 1855, Whitman spent most of his professional life writing and rewriting Leaves of Grass, revising it multiple times until his death. There have been held to be either six or nine individual editions of Leaves of Grass, the count varying depending on how they are distinguished. This resulted in vastly different editions over four decades—the first edition being a small book of twelve poems, and the last, a compilation of over 400.
A humorist (American) or humourist is an intellectual who uses humor, or wit, in writing or public speaking, but is not an artist who seeks only to elicit laughs. Humorists are distinct from comedians, who are show business entertainers whose business is to make an audience laugh. It is possible to play both roles in the course of a career.
Robert Charles Benchley was an American humorist best known for his work as a newspaper columnist and film actor. From his beginnings at The Harvard Lampoon while attending Harvard University, through his many years writing essays and articles for Vanity Fair and The New Yorker and his acclaimed short films, Benchley's style of humor brought him respect and success during his life, from his peers at the Algonquin Round Table in New York City to contemporaries in the burgeoning film industry.
Justin Daniel Kaplan was an American writer and editor. The general editor of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, he was best known as a biographer, particularly of Samuel Clemens, Lincoln Steffens, and Walt Whitman.
"O Captain! My Captain!" is an extended metaphor poem written by Walt Whitman in 1865 about the death of U.S. president Abraham Lincoln. Well received upon publication, the poem was Whitman's first to be anthologized and the most popular during his lifetime. Together with "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd", "Hush'd Be the Camps To-day", and "This Dust was Once the Man", it is one of four poems written by Whitman about the death of Lincoln.
"When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" is a long poem written by American poet Walt Whitman (1819–1892) as an elegy to President Abraham Lincoln. It was written in the summer of 1865 during a period of profound national mourning in the aftermath of the president's assassination on 14 April of that year.
Charles Warren Stoddard was an American author and editor best known for his travel books about Polynesian life.
Pfaff's was a drinking establishment in Manhattan, New York City, known for its literary and artistic clientele.
Mark Doty is an American poet and memoirist best known for his work My Alexandria. He was the winner of the National Book Award for Poetry in 2008.
William Winter was an American dramatic critic and author.
Galaxy Magazine, or The Galaxy, was an American monthly magazine founded by William Conant Church and his brother Francis P. Church in 1866. In 1868, Sheldon and Company gained financial control of the magazine and it was eventually absorbed by The Atlantic Monthly in 1878. Notable contributors to the magazine include Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Ion Hanford Perdicaris and Henry James.
"Hush'd Be the Camps To-Day" is a poem by Walt Whitman dedicated to Abraham Lincoln. The poem was written on April 19, 1865, shortly after Lincoln's assassination. Whitman greatly admired Lincoln and went on to write additional poetry about him: "O Captain! My Captain!", "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd", and "This Dust Was Once the Man." "Hush'd" is not particularly well known, and is generally considered to have been hastily written. Some critics highlight the poem as Whitman's first attempt to respond to Lincoln's death and emphasize that it would have drawn comparatively little attention if Whitman had not written his other poems on Lincoln.
The Walt Whitman House is a historic building in Camden, New Jersey, United States, which was the last residence of American poet Walt Whitman, in his declining years before his death. It is located at 330 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, known as Mickle St. during Whitman's time there.
David S. Reynolds is an American literary critic, biographer, and historian who has written about American literature and culture. He is the author or editor of fifteen books, on the Civil War era—including figures such as Walt Whitman, Abraham Lincoln, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, George Lippard, and John Brown. Reynolds has been awarded the Bancroft Prize, the Lincoln Prize, the Christian Gauss Award, the Ambassador Book Award, the Gustavus Myers Book Award, the John Hope Franklin Prize, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is a regular reviewer for The New York Times Book Review.
The Saturday Press was the name of a literary weekly newspaper, published in New York City from 1858 to 1860 and again from 1865 to 1866, edited by Henry Clapp, Jr.
The New York Aurora was a 19th-century daily newspaper in New York City.
The American poet Walt Whitman greatly admired Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States, and was deeply affected by his assassination, writing several poems as elegies and giving a series of lectures on Lincoln. The two never met. Shortly after Lincoln was killed in April 1865, Whitman hastily wrote the first of his Lincoln poems, "Hush'd Be the Camps To-Day". In the following months, he wrote two more: "O Captain! My Captain!" and "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd". Both appeared in his collection Sequel to Drum-Taps later that year. The poems—particularly "My Captain!"—were well received and popular upon publication and, in the following years, Whitman styled himself as an interpreter of Lincoln. In 1871, his fourth poem on Lincoln, "This Dust Was Once the Man", was published, and the four were grouped together as the "President Lincoln's Burial Hymn" cluster in Passage to India. In 1881, the poems were republished in the "Memories of President Lincoln" cluster of Leaves of Grass.
Walt Whitman gave a series of lectures on Abraham Lincoln from 1879 to 1890. They centered around the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, but also covered years leading up to and during the American Civil War and sometimes included readings of poems such as "O Captain! My Captain!". The lectures began as a benefit for Whitman and were generally popular and well received.