Whitman among the Bohemians

For several years just before and just after his 1860 edition of  Leaves of Grass  appeared, Walt Whitman regularly frequented Pfaff’s beer cellar in downtown Manhattan. The basement bar was the very center of mid-nineteenth-century American bohemian activity and was heavily patronized by writers, artists, musicians, actors, intellectuals, and radicals such as free-love advocate Henry Clapp, Jr., and Broadway  succès de scandale  Adah Isaacs Menken. Numerous creative and poli