Walt Whitman's Champion

Download or read book Walt Whitman's Champion written by Jerome Loving and published by . This book was released on 1978 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1865 Walt Whitman was dismissed from his clerkship in the Department of the Interior because Secretary James Harlan judged Leaves of Grass indecent, unfit to be read aloud "by the evening lamp." Most eloquent among Whitman's defenders was William Douglas O'Connor, whose pamphlet The Good Gray Poet, a panegyric to Whitman and an attack on literary censorship in general and Harlan in particular, was the first of his many heroic if sometimes excessive efforts on Whitman's behalf.