Walt Whitman's Champion William Douglas O'Connor

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.Loving, Jerome is the author of 'Walt Whitman's Champion William Douglas O'Connor' with ISBN 9781585440856 and ISBN 158544085X.