“Banned in Boston”: Moral Reform Politics and the New England Society for the Suppression of Vice

摘要

AFTER laboring on the outside margins of polite literary circles for his entirencareer, Walt Whitman traveled to Boston in August 1881 to oversee thenpublication of his Leaves of Grass. The poet was on the verge of enjoyingnthe national reputation that had eluded him for so long. He viewed the publicationnof the seventh and definitive edition of Leaves of Grass by a leading Bostonnpublisher, James R. Osgood and Company, as a vindication of his lifelongnlabor. Now Whitman was about to be ranked with other notable Osgoodnauthors, including Henry James, William Dean Howells, and Mark Twain.n2