![Franklin Evans, or The Inebriate](/assets/artwork/1x1-42817eea7ade52607a760cbee00d1495.gif)
![Franklin Evans, or The Inebriate](/assets/artwork/1x1-42817eea7ade52607a760cbee00d1495.gif)
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Franklin Evans, or The Inebriate
A Tale of the Times
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- 20,99 €
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- 20,99 €
Publisher Description
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.
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PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The only novel by America's eventual apostle of freedom and spontaneity first appeared in a broadsheet form in 1842, cost 12 1/2 cents and sold 20,000 copies. It's been out of print for 40 years, and it's easy to see why: less a novel than a prohibition tract in fiction, its clich d-even-then story is that of an innocent from Whitman's native Long Island and his corruption by the music halls and taverns of New York City. It ends with the hero sagely advising "that every young man should marry as soon as possible, and have a home of his own." It turns out the author of "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" wrote a novel that's not only hysterically antiurban but riven with the anti-Irish "nativism" that stains so much mid-Victorian American discourse. Despite that, this well-introduced volume is a useful, if hardly enjoyable, edition for literary and historical study.