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Life and Adventures of Jack Engle
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  • Published: 30 May 2017
  • ISBN: 9780525526780
  • Imprint: RH US Audio Adult
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $23.00
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Life and Adventures of Jack Engle

An Auto-Biography; A Story of New York at the Present Time in which the Reader Will Find Some Familiar Characters

  • Walt Whitman
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In 1852, young Walt Whitman—a down-on-his-luck housebuilder in Brooklyn—was hard at work writing two books. One would become one of the most famous volumes of poetry in American history, a free-verse revelation beloved the world over, Leaves of Grass. The other, a novel, would be published under a pseudonym and serialized in a newspaper. A short, rollicking story of orphanhood, avarice, and adventure in New York City, Life and Adventures of Jack Engle appeared to little fanfare.
 
Then it disappeared.
 
No one laid eyes on it until 2016, when literary scholar Zachary Turpin, University of Houston, followed a paper trail deep into the Library of Congress, where the sole surviving copy of Jack Engle has lain waiting for generations. Now, after more than 160 years, the University of Iowa Press is honored to reprint this lost work, restoring a missing piece of American literature by one of the world’s greatest authors, written as he verged on immortality.


Read by Jon Hamm, with an afterword written and read by Zachary Turpin
  • Published: 30 May 2017
  • ISBN: 9780525526780
  • Imprint: RH US Audio Adult
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $23.00
Categories:

Praise for Life and Adventures of Jack Engle

Praise for Life and Adventures of Jack Engle:

  • "The 36,000-word Life and Adventures of Jack Engle, which was discovered last summer by a graduate student, is. . . . A quasi-Dickensian tale of an orphan's adventures, it features a villainous lawyer, virtuous Quakers, glad-handing politicians, a sultry Spanish dancer and more than a few unlikely plot twists and jarring narrative shifts." --Jennifer Schuessler, New York Times

  • "In 2015, Zachary Turpin made international news by discovering a long-lost book of Whitman's journalism called Manly Health and Training, which was rightly hailed as the most significant Whitman find in generations. Unbelievably, Turpin has outdone himself by discovering an even more important lost Whitman work, this time a novel, the only piece of fiction that we know of that was written after Whitman began working on Leaves of Grass." --Ed Folsom, Walt Whitman Quarterly Review