Every Hour, Every Atom

Some of the dimmest years in Walt Whitman’s life precede the advent of Leaves of Grass in 1855, when he was working as a jour­nalist and fiction writer. Starting around 1850, what he’d begun writing in his personal notebooks was far more enigmatic than anything he’d done before. One of Whitman’s most secretive projects during this timeframe was a novel, Life and Adventures of Jack Engle ; serialized anonymously in the spring of 1852, and rediscovered and properly published in 2017. The key to th