LEAVES OF GRASS by Whitman Walt - 1856

Brooklyn: [for the author], 1856. The Rare First Octavo Edition and second edition overall. A COPY WITH FINE PROVENANCE, A PLEASING ASSOCIATION COPY AND AS WELL, A WHITMAN FAMILY COPY. Printed for the Author in Brooklyn, NY as was the first edition of the prior year.. With a portrait frontispiece. 8vo, the printer/publisher' original green cloth, gilt decorated on the cover as the first edition and with gilt designs and lettering developed especially for this printing. A very good copy with some light foxing as is typical. The spine has a bit of wear at the head and tail, some light evidence of wear or age overall, a well preserved, tight copy, hinges in good order, a copy with fine provenance. FIRST OCTAVO EDITION, PRINTED ONE YEAR AFTER THE FIRST, AND AGAIN, IN BROOKLYN AND FOR THE AUTHOR. A COPY WITH FAMILY PROVENANCE AND A PLEASING ASSOCIATION COPY, FROM A WHITMAN FAMILY COLLECTION. Most probably belonging to Whitman’s sister, Mary Elizabeth and then passed on to her daughter and finally to her granddaughter Zora Tuthill with Ms. Tuthill’s ownership inscription on the front free-fly. Mary Elizabeth appears in several of Walt Whitman's stories and she often seems to be the subject of Whitman's inquiries about loss of innocence. She is the unnamed fourteen year old in is story "My Boys and Girls" (1844) and is presented as the sweet Sister Mary in his children's story "The Half-Breed: A Tale of the Western Frontier" (1845). Walt Whitman often visited and stayed with the family at the Greenport home, owned by his sister, Mary Elizabeth Whitman Van Nostrand. Whenever he came to visit his sister and her children, he would use the house as an inspirational place to write. The home, a small white house, in a small town, represented for Whitman idyllic hearth and home living. Mary, unlike many of her siblings, enjoyed an average normal existence, and she separated herself from the eccentricities of the Whitman family. For Whitman, time spent with Mary in Greenport was peaceful and contented. Mary Elizabeth was an important influence on Walt Whitman because she represented for him ideals he wanted to believe in. Mary Elizabeth provided a haven for him where he could visit for rest and where he could rediscover his dream for the Whitman family. 'Whitman also wrote essays about the North Fork from this house,' (Gail Horton, Stirling Historical Society). Walt Whitman was known for his generosity toward his family. Periodically, he’d give his sister money to make improvements on the house.. “One of the improvements she made was to put on the porch and add tin walls and tin ceilings in the living room.” Those features are still part of the home today.
This second edition was greatly enlarged by the addition of 20 poems, as well as a laudatory letter from Ralph Waldo Emerson, Whitman's long reply, and several reviews of the books (including Whitman's own anonymous review, originally published in the Brooklyn "Daily Times"). The book is usually found in rough condition if found at all.
An important contemporary of Whitman's and a revered figure in the New England landscape of the American Renaissance, Bronson Alcott recorded in his journal for October 4, 1856, that he had gone to Brooklyn to see Walt Whitman. "I pass a couple of hours, and find him to be an extraordinary person, full of brute power, certainly of genius and audacity, and likely to make his mark on Young America--he affirming himself to be its representative man and poet. I must meet him again, and more than once, to mete his merits and place in this Pantheon of the West. He gives me his new book of poems, the Leaves of Grass, 2nd edition, with new verses, and asks me to write him if I have any more to say about him or his master, Emerson...." Alcott also refers to Whitman's generosity in a letter to his wife on 10 October: "I crossed to Brooklyn and passed some hours with Walt Whitman the Poet, author of the Leaves of Grass, of which he gave me a copy of the new edition, just published, and containing a characteristic letter of his in answer to Emerson, printed some time since in 'the Tribune.' I am well rewarded for finding this extraordinary man, and shall see more of him before I leave N.Y." Alcott did indeed see more of him--he returned with Henry David Thoreau and had an interesting visit, during which Whitman gave Thoreau a copy of the book as well.