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LITERARY HILL
A Compendium of Readers, Writers, Books, & Events
by Karen Lyon Whitman in Washington Imagine you’re a wounded Union soldier in a Washington hospital, homesick and hurting. In walks a man, six feet tall and portly, with a long grizzled beard, coarse clothing, and a bulging haversack slung over his shoulder. He sits and listens, perhaps offers you letter paper, a biscuit, or some tobacco. Little would you dream that your generous visitor with the kind eyes was one of the finest poets America ever produced. Garrett Peck’s new book, “Walt Whitman in Washington, D.C.: The Civil War and America’s Great Poet” focuses on the decade that Whitman spent in the nation’s capital, productive years that saw him writing some of his best-known poetry while working as a clerk, most famously in the Patent Office. He arrived from Brooklyn in 1862— penniless thanks to a pickpocket in Philadelphia— to look for his brother, who was wounded at Fredericksburg. What should have been a brief sojourn stretched until 1873, when a stroke sent him back home to Brooklyn, where he died in 1892. During his DC years, Whitman worked as a copyist for several federal agencies, freelanced for the New York Times, rented a variety of humble rooms, established a literary circle of friends, and met his life’s companion, Peter Doyle. He also became a fixture at the hospitals set up to care for the Civil War sick and wounded, making hundreds of visits and, by his own estimate, being “sustainer of spirit and body” to tens of thousands of soldiers. Using original source material, vintage photographs, and his unerring sense of history, Peck deftly tells the story of this gifted poet whose presence
The great American poet’s decade in Washington gets the Peck treatment in this well-researched slice of DC history.
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A new book details library founder Henry Clay Folger’s passion for Shakespeare’s First Folio.
made such a difference to so many during that terrible time, and whose legacy—both as an icon in the gay community and as the Good Gray Poet— continues today. Garrett Peck is a historian and tour guide whose five previous books include “Prohibition in Washington, D.C.” and “The Smithsonian Castle and the Seneca Quarry.” For more about the author (and his Walt Whitman Walking Tours), visit www. garrettpeck.com.
First Folio Fixation It began in 1889 with the purchase of a copy of Shakespeare’s Fourth Folio at an auction in New York. The purchaser was a young oil company clerk who had to ask if he could pay off his $107.50 investment in installments. His name was Henry Clay Folger. Some four decades later, he would found a library here on Capitol Hill that holds the largest collection of Shakespeare in the world. In “The Millionaire and the Bard: Henry Folger’s Obsessive Hunt for Shakespeare’s First Folio,” author Andrea Mays focuses on Folger’s passion for one treasure in particular: the rare 1623 First Folio. Compiled by two of Shakespeare’s fellow actors after his death in 1616, the First Folio is the first collected edition of his plays and the only source for 18 of the plays that might otherwise have been lost. Fewer than 240 copies survive. In telling “the story of the man who coveted the First Folio, and the man who composed it,” Mays supplies biographies of both Folger and Shakespeare, as well as a history of the First Folio itself, and a glimpse into the esoteric world of rare book collecting. She provides bibliographic details
for each First Folio that Folger acquired—or, in at least one case, failed to acquire—and documents all the wheeling and dealing required to obtain them. Mays devotes almost equal time to Folger’s career, which saw him rise to the upper echelons of Standard Oil and, as she notes, gave him the wherewithal to indulge his bibliophilic passion. “Henry Folger was…an unapologetic industrialist,” she notes. “And the Folger Shakespeare Library is a triumph of American capitalism and philanthropy” that will forever serve as his “greatest monument.” “The Millionaire and the Bard” is Andrea Mays’s first book. She divides her time between Capitol Hill and the West Coast, where she teaches economics at California State University.
Rocket Man Look out, bad guys! Here comes Rufus “Rocket” Crockett. That’s Lieutenant Crockett to you, a US Navy Korean War flying ace who, with his “handsome ‘dark Gable’ face…pencil-thin moustache, white silk scarf,” leather flight jacket, and rakishly cocked cap, attracts women and trouble in equal portions. “Rocket Crockett and the Shanghai She-Devil,” by local author Christopher Chambers, soars off at a high pitch with a dogfight over the East China Sea. Crockett prevails, of course, saving baseball star Ted Williams in the bargain—and from there, things really take off. In this grin-inspiring homage to 1950s pulp fiction, Crockett frequently finds himself “in deep kimchi,” trading wits and jabs with the CIA, the mob, and the Orchid tong, led by a ruthless Chinese dowager with black lips, breasts like “oriental
Pulp hero Rocket Crockett takes on organized crime and the CIA, while never losing his cool.