Walt Whitman's Secret
As compelling and revelatory as Colm Toibin's The Master, Walt Whitman's Secret mines the life of the most influential poet in the American canon for insights about creativity, relations between the sexes and the dangers of excessive patriotism.
In this wonderfully imagined novel, Walt Whitman's secret isn't his homosexuality but another one entirely. It's a political secret, one that the greatest American poet of the nineteenth century has pledged himself to keep until he is on his deathbed.
Only in that way can Whitman protect the great love of his life - a Confederate deserter he met in Washington during the Civil War - from the calumnies and scandals that have muddied his own reputation ever since the first publication of Leaves…
George Fetherling has published 50 books of poetry, fiction, memoirs, travel, criticism and history, including the much-acclaimed Travels by Night: A Memoir of the Sixties. He is also former literary editor of both The Toronto Star and the Kingston Whig-Standard, and has received a Harbourfront Prize for his "substantial contribution to Canadian letters." He lives in Vancouver.