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Franklin Evans, or The Inebriate: A Tale of the Times
Not many people know that Walt Whitman—arguably the preeminent American poet of the nineteenth century—began his literary career as a novelist. Franklin Evans, or The Inebriate: A Tale of the Times was his first and only novel. Published in 1842, during a period of widespread temperance activity, it became Whitman’s most popular work during his lifetime, selling some twenty thousand copies.
The novel tells the rags-to-riches story of Franklin Evans, an innocent young man from the Long Island countryside who seeks his fortune in New York City. Corrupted by music halls, theaters, and above all taverns, he gradually becomes a drunkard. Until the very end of the tale, Evans’s efforts to abstain fail, and each time he resumes drinking, another series of misadventures ensues. Along the way, Evans encounters a world of mores and conventions rapidly changing in response to the vicissitudes of slavery, investment capital, urban mass culture, and fervent reform. Although Evans finally signs a temperance pledge, his sobriety remains haunted by the often contradictory and unsettling changes in antebellum American culture.
The editors’ substantial introduction situates Franklin Evans in relation to Whitman’s life and career, mid-nineteenth-century American print culture, and many of the developments and institutions the novel depicts, including urbanization, immigration, slavery, the temperance movement, and new understandings of class, race, gender, and sexuality. This edition includes a short temperance story Whitman published at about the same time as he did Franklin Evans, the surviving fragment of what appears to be another unfinished temperance novel by Whitman, and a temperance speech Abraham Lincoln gave the same year that Franklin Evans was published.
The novel tells the rags-to-riches story of Franklin Evans, an innocent young man from the Long Island countryside who seeks his fortune in New York City. Corrupted by music halls, theaters, and above all taverns, he gradually becomes a drunkard. Until the very end of the tale, Evans’s efforts to abstain fail, and each time he resumes drinking, another series of misadventures ensues. Along the way, Evans encounters a world of mores and conventions rapidly changing in response to the vicissitudes of slavery, investment capital, urban mass culture, and fervent reform. Although Evans finally signs a temperance pledge, his sobriety remains haunted by the often contradictory and unsettling changes in antebellum American culture.
The editors’ substantial introduction situates Franklin Evans in relation to Whitman’s life and career, mid-nineteenth-century American print culture, and many of the developments and institutions the novel depicts, including urbanization, immigration, slavery, the temperance movement, and new understandings of class, race, gender, and sexuality. This edition includes a short temperance story Whitman published at about the same time as he did Franklin Evans, the surviving fragment of what appears to be another unfinished temperance novel by Whitman, and a temperance speech Abraham Lincoln gave the same year that Franklin Evans was published.
208 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1842
4 people are currently reading
114 people want to read
About the author
Walt Whitman
1,811 books5,440 followersWalter Whitman Jr. was an American poet, essayist, and journalist. He is considered one of the most influential poets in American literature. Whitman incorporated both transcendentalism and realism in his writings and is often called the father of free verse. His work was controversial in his time, particularly his 1855 poetry collection Leaves of Grass, which was described by some as obscene for its overt sensuality.
Whitman was born in Huntington on Long Island, and lived in Brooklyn as a child and through much of his career. At the age of 11, he left formal schooling to go to work. He worked as a journalist, a teacher, and a government clerk. Whitman's major poetry collection, Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855, was financed with his own money and became well known. The work was an attempt to reach out to the common person with an American epic. Whitman continued expanding and revising Leaves of Grass until his death in 1892.
During the American Civil War, he went to Washington, D.C., and worked in hospitals caring for the wounded. His poetry often focused on both loss and healing. On the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, whom Whitman greatly admired, he authored two poems, "O Captain! My Captain!" and "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd", and gave a series of lectures on Lincoln. After suffering a stroke towards the end of his life, Whitman moved to Camden, New Jersey, where his health further declined. When he died at the age of 72, his funeral was a public event.
Whitman's influence on poetry remains strong. Art historian Mary Berenson wrote, "You cannot really understand America without Walt Whitman, without Leaves of Grass... He has expressed that civilization, 'up to date,' as he would say, and no student of the philosophy of history can do without him." Modernist poet Ezra Pound called Whitman "America's poet... He is America."
Whitman was born in Huntington on Long Island, and lived in Brooklyn as a child and through much of his career. At the age of 11, he left formal schooling to go to work. He worked as a journalist, a teacher, and a government clerk. Whitman's major poetry collection, Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855, was financed with his own money and became well known. The work was an attempt to reach out to the common person with an American epic. Whitman continued expanding and revising Leaves of Grass until his death in 1892.
During the American Civil War, he went to Washington, D.C., and worked in hospitals caring for the wounded. His poetry often focused on both loss and healing. On the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, whom Whitman greatly admired, he authored two poems, "O Captain! My Captain!" and "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd", and gave a series of lectures on Lincoln. After suffering a stroke towards the end of his life, Whitman moved to Camden, New Jersey, where his health further declined. When he died at the age of 72, his funeral was a public event.
Whitman's influence on poetry remains strong. Art historian Mary Berenson wrote, "You cannot really understand America without Walt Whitman, without Leaves of Grass... He has expressed that civilization, 'up to date,' as he would say, and no student of the philosophy of history can do without him." Modernist poet Ezra Pound called Whitman "America's poet... He is America."
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
January 25, 2020
The Evils of Drink
Nel 1826, con la pubblicazione di sei sermoni sull’Intemperanza, il predicatore evangelico Lyman Beecher avviò la sua personale crociata contro le sostanze alcoliche. Nello stesso anno, a Boston, venne fondata l’American Temperance Society. In poco più di dieci anni, l’associazione avrebbe contato oltre 1.250.000 membri in tutti gli Stati Uniti.
Lo stesso Whitman, che da giovane non aveva mai consumato alcool, aderì con fervore al movimento.
Nel novembre del 1842, a soli 23 anni, WW pubblicò Franklin Evans, or The Inebriate: A Tale of the Times. Il romanzo racconta la storia di un giovane che lascia Long Island per tentar fortuna a New York e le alterne fortune che ne deriveranno, causate dallo smodato consumo di alcool cui sarà indirizzato da cattive compagnie.
Amo molto la scrittura di Whitman, e questo libro non fa eccezione, «Molti anni fa – disse il capo – quando le mie guance erano tenere come le tue e gli arti ancora non avevano avvertito il torpore di numerosi inverni, io stesso attraversai da un capo all’altro i nostri territori di caccia, come tu hai fatto oggi. Intorno a me incombeva l’Influsso Oscuro, e non una sola freccia aveva eseguito il mio ordine.», ma questo libro, nonostante contenga alcune bellissime 'storie nella storia', non mi ha coinvolto come avrei desiderato. Sembrava scritto da un integerrimo, e ingessato, membro della Washingtonian Temperance Society.
Whitman, ormai diventato un signore maturo, di questo libro disse: «It was damned rot - rot of the worst sort - not insincere perhaps, but rot, nevertheless».
Il caro Walt, in tarda età, si convertì ai buoni vini ed allo champagne … per fortuna!
Nel 1826, con la pubblicazione di sei sermoni sull’Intemperanza, il predicatore evangelico Lyman Beecher avviò la sua personale crociata contro le sostanze alcoliche. Nello stesso anno, a Boston, venne fondata l’American Temperance Society. In poco più di dieci anni, l’associazione avrebbe contato oltre 1.250.000 membri in tutti gli Stati Uniti.
Lo stesso Whitman, che da giovane non aveva mai consumato alcool, aderì con fervore al movimento.
Nel novembre del 1842, a soli 23 anni, WW pubblicò Franklin Evans, or The Inebriate: A Tale of the Times. Il romanzo racconta la storia di un giovane che lascia Long Island per tentar fortuna a New York e le alterne fortune che ne deriveranno, causate dallo smodato consumo di alcool cui sarà indirizzato da cattive compagnie.
Amo molto la scrittura di Whitman, e questo libro non fa eccezione, «Molti anni fa – disse il capo – quando le mie guance erano tenere come le tue e gli arti ancora non avevano avvertito il torpore di numerosi inverni, io stesso attraversai da un capo all’altro i nostri territori di caccia, come tu hai fatto oggi. Intorno a me incombeva l’Influsso Oscuro, e non una sola freccia aveva eseguito il mio ordine.», ma questo libro, nonostante contenga alcune bellissime 'storie nella storia', non mi ha coinvolto come avrei desiderato. Sembrava scritto da un integerrimo, e ingessato, membro della Washingtonian Temperance Society.
Whitman, ormai diventato un signore maturo, di questo libro disse: «It was damned rot - rot of the worst sort - not insincere perhaps, but rot, nevertheless».
Il caro Walt, in tarda età, si convertì ai buoni vini ed allo champagne … per fortuna!
June 24, 2020
Whitman’s Franklin Evans (1842) will not make my official reading list for exams, but I did just finish it as a title on my preliminary list. What’s probably most interesting about the novel (Whitman’s first!) is he ironically wrote it on a three-day bender merely to turn a profit. Temperance novels were wildly popular in the 19C, especially in the 1840s with the concurrent Washingtonian Movement. Whitman published the novel in a special issue of The New World, and it was also later serialized in 1846 over twelve issues in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle (all of Whitman’s fiction was originally published in New York periodicals).
Synopsis: Franklin Evans, a naive farm boy, leaves Long Island for New York City in search of opportunity. Easily influenced by a wealthy man he meets on the carriage to the city, Mr. Colby, as well as other young bachelors, Evans is introduced to the drinking halls, taverns, and musical theaters of the debauch city.
Evans descends into the lifestyle of a drunkard, degree by degree, causing the the death of his two wives and loss of employment. Evans’s second wife, Margaret, a “creole,” he meets as a slave on a Virginian plantation, later murders Evans’s blond-haired, blue-eyed mistress, Mrs. Conway, before Margaret commits suicide. Yet by the novel’s end, Evans reforms his ways, becomes sober, and leads a model, temperate life.
Interesting thing: 1) In generic fashion, Whitman uses the language (and literal depiction) of slavery as a metaphor to depict the evils and dangers of intemperance. Just like early passages from Leaves of Grass depicting (and personifying) enslaved voices, Whitman erases slavery & race from later editions of Franklin Evans. Ed Folsom has argued Whitman’s erasure of race achieves the effect of “a spectral black presence both haunts and energizes [his] work” (“Erasing Race”).
2) In Franklin Evans, alcoholism is treated as a moral failing completely within the individual’s control to avoid or overcome. This conception of illness was common at the time for conditions that were aligned with “sinful,” derogatory behavior. Alcoholism was also associated with non-white, lower-class people. “True” gentlemen and ladies rarely suffered from alcoholism, unless they had some blemish to their pedigree. In this way we can see both biological determinism and moral policing as shaping the conception of the “disease” of alcoholism at the time and well into the early and mid-twentieth century (with a legacy still observable today).
Synopsis: Franklin Evans, a naive farm boy, leaves Long Island for New York City in search of opportunity. Easily influenced by a wealthy man he meets on the carriage to the city, Mr. Colby, as well as other young bachelors, Evans is introduced to the drinking halls, taverns, and musical theaters of the debauch city.
Evans descends into the lifestyle of a drunkard, degree by degree, causing the the death of his two wives and loss of employment. Evans’s second wife, Margaret, a “creole,” he meets as a slave on a Virginian plantation, later murders Evans’s blond-haired, blue-eyed mistress, Mrs. Conway, before Margaret commits suicide. Yet by the novel’s end, Evans reforms his ways, becomes sober, and leads a model, temperate life.
Interesting thing: 1) In generic fashion, Whitman uses the language (and literal depiction) of slavery as a metaphor to depict the evils and dangers of intemperance. Just like early passages from Leaves of Grass depicting (and personifying) enslaved voices, Whitman erases slavery & race from later editions of Franklin Evans. Ed Folsom has argued Whitman’s erasure of race achieves the effect of “a spectral black presence both haunts and energizes [his] work” (“Erasing Race”).
2) In Franklin Evans, alcoholism is treated as a moral failing completely within the individual’s control to avoid or overcome. This conception of illness was common at the time for conditions that were aligned with “sinful,” derogatory behavior. Alcoholism was also associated with non-white, lower-class people. “True” gentlemen and ladies rarely suffered from alcoholism, unless they had some blemish to their pedigree. In this way we can see both biological determinism and moral policing as shaping the conception of the “disease” of alcoholism at the time and well into the early and mid-twentieth century (with a legacy still observable today).
December 14, 2024
“Drink booze and you’ll ruin everyone’s lives around you (but maybe the world will take pity on you and make you undeservedly wealthy anyways if you do one good deed). There, saved you 90 minutes of reading.
Main redeeming quality was realizing that you can fail at one thing but go on to be a genius at another - in this case fiction then poetry.
Main redeeming quality was realizing that you can fail at one thing but go on to be a genius at another - in this case fiction then poetry.
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March 8, 2021Not his form.
September 13, 2023
This was literal torture. The only reason this hasn’t entirely been forgotten is because the author would later become a famous poet, and even he admitted the book was awful. This isn’t literature, it’s poorly written anti-alcohol propaganda.
October 6, 2017
Per leggere la recensione vai su:
http://letteraturaecinema.blogspot.it...
http://letteraturaecinema.blogspot.it...
October 31, 2021
stick to poems
November 8, 2019
Another book I read for class!
All I have to say is that I'm really glad Whitman realized that he preferred to write poetry over novels lol.
All I have to say is that I'm really glad Whitman realized that he preferred to write poetry over novels lol.
June 16, 2014
The three-star rating is an average between a five-star rating of an intriguing entry in Whitman's life and a one- or two-star rating for the actual story itself. From a historical point of view, this book is amazing (I may or may not expound upon this later). But from a purely entertainment perspective, unless you are interested in the entirety of Whitman's works or temperance novels in general, I would not recommend reading it. It's beyond over-the-top and cliched (even though calling something cliche seems cliched, I stand by my assessment). Even Whitman tried to distance himself from it in the end.
January 1, 2014
For Whitman completists only--and even then, I have strong reservations about this simplistic narrative of a besotted drunkard that is by turns predictable and implausible. One can't even call it a mediocre bildungsroman in the vein of Dickens: it's too short for that, though it does feature the kind of benefactors and rascally villains (here, all feebly sketched and caricatured) that populate Dickens's novels. This polemical piece of work has nothing to recommend it other than the occasional poetic flourish.
October 10, 2011
I wish I could say something better about this, but it was poorly put together, implausible in several parts due to the sensationalist rhetoric at work, and down right sexist in some ways that I don't have time to get into at the moment. Some of the poetic description on might expect from Whitman is there, but it doesn't make up for the flaws.
August 20, 2014
The novel itself is interesting merely as a historical curiosity, but the extensive introduction to it is fantastic. It taught me some things about Whitman that I had not known before.
October 17, 2015
Whitman's often-banned novel about the love of a white man and a creole slave. A tragic tale and some of Whitman's best penmanship.
Read
April 5, 2016i will read
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews