Walt Whitman as an Editor

Charles Montgomery Skinner (1852-1907) was one of the most important American writers in the field of folklore, myths and popular traditions of the United States.
He was born in Victor, New York, but his family moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, a year after his birth. When Skinner was 14, the family moved to Hartford, Connecticut. His father was a Universalist minister. By 1881 Skinner had moved to New York City and secured a position as a reporter with the Brooklyn Times. In 1884, he joined to the editorial staff of the Brooklyn Eagle where he remained until his death.
Skinner published collections of myths, legends and folklore from across the United States, including its territories, and North America. He hoped that America’s progress would transform the nation’s few legends into few but great ones — «as time goes on the figures seen against the morning twilight of our history will rise to more commanding stature». He hoped to combine folklore conventions with New England transcendentalism to keep alive traditions endangered by the industrial age. The first of these works, the two-volume Myths and Legends of Our Own Land (Philadelphia, 1896), an absolute masterpiece of the American literary tradition, was heavily promoted by its publisher and went through five printings the first year it was available. This was followed by a collection of folktales from Mexico and Canada in 1899 and then one covering U.S. possessions in the Caribbean and Pacific in 1900. Skinner was not formally trained as a folklorist and he included a wide range of legends, including tales attributed to Native Americans, Revolutionary War stories, and a wide variety of ghost stories.
Skinner also authored several plays, including Villon, the Vagabond. Skinner’s other interests included the seasons, especially as they changed inside of industrializing cities (Myths and Legends of Flowers, Trees, Fruits and Plants (Philadelphia, 1911). In order to improve the urban environment, he authored a guide to gardening and urban beautification. He also commented on turn-of-the-century America’s turbulent economy in Workers and the Trusts and American Communes. His other contributions to American literature included works of natural history such as With Feet to the Earth and Do-Nothing Days.
Skinner’s short essay Walt Whitman as an Editor, which we propose today to our readers, was published in November 1903 in the magazine The Atlantic Monthly (Volume 92, No. 553).
In this essay, Skinner provides a rare, “humanizing” glimpse of Walt Whitman before he became the “Good Gray Poet” of American mythology.
Walt Whitman as an Editor offer to us a vivid biographical sketch of Walt Whitman’s tenure at the Brooklyn Times and the Brooklyn Eagle. Written a decade after Whitman’s death, the essay serves as a bridge between the “elemental” poet the world came to know through Leaves of Grass and the “indolent”, unconventional journalist remembered by his colleagues.