With the publication of Volumes VIII and IX, some ninety years after the appearance in 1906 of the first volume, all two and a half million words of Horace Traubel's Walt Whitman in Camden are now in print. Altogether the volumes cover the last four years of Whitman's life, from 1888 to 1892, and consist of nearly day by day renditions of Whitman's conversations, correspondence, and such activities as he was still up to, along with reports of his last illnesses and lingering death. Traubel constructed this record from notes sometimes taken in the half-light of Whitman's sickroom in the little house Whitman owned on Mickle Street in Camden, New Jersey, or jotted down later from memory, when he returned home to his wife and family or to his desk at the bank that employed him.

LRB 4 June 1998 | PDF Download