The First Thirty-Five Years

By Ed Folsom

The Whitman Studies Association was born just as the American Literature Association was founded in 1989 by Alfred Bendixen and a small advisory group of American literature scholars; they set up the organization to be “a coalition of 110 affiliated societies mostly concerned with the work of a particular author.” At the time there was no group, organization, or society dedicated to studying Whitman’s work. In large part, this was due to the disdain that most senior Whitman scholars—like Gay Wilson Allen, James E. Miller, Jr., Roger Asselineau, and C. Carroll Hollis—had for any permanent Whitman association; many of them felt it was too easy for such a group to become a Whitman-admiration society, and they all wanted to avoid any suspicion they were a band of “Whitmaniacs” (to use Algernon Charles Swinburne’s dismissive term for that cult-like group that was gathering around Whitman in the 1880s, often known as Whitman’s “disciples”). One of those disciples, Horace Traubel, spent much of his later years working to organize national and international Whitman societies. Whitman Studies scholars by mid-twentieth century, then, resisted organizing themselves into a single group to promote the poet and his works.

But in June of 1989, Alfred Bendixen organized a small conference in San Diego on American writers; it was called the “Cal State Symposium on American Literature,” sponsored by the English Department of California State University, Los Angeles. The real purpose of the conference was to organize a coalition of the various societies devoted to the study of American authors. Sessions were held on many American writers, and Bendixen had urged Jerome Loving, who was on the organizing committee, to set up a Whitman panel, which he did. I spoke there, along with John Carlos Rowe and Harold Aspiz. It was clear Whitman needed to be represented at the organizing conference, even though there was no Whitman society to join the “coalition” of societies devoted to the study of American authors. It seems that all the other major American authors had their own societies, and so, without a society, only Whitman would be left out of the coalition and thus there would be no group to organize Whitman panels for the soon-to-be thriving ALA. I was then just a few years into editing the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, and Jerome Loving came to me after that first panel and said I needed to set up an official Whitman group, so that Whitman could take his rightful place in the new coalition. Most of the other author societies had their own journals or newsletters to keep their membership informed of panels and events focused on their particular author. Whitman had a journal but no society. “Who better to organize such an association,” Loving said, “than the editor of the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review?”

Thus the birth, such as it was, of the Whitman Studies Association, a name that sounded like more than it actually was. I gave it its name, avoiding the “Walt Whitman Association” or “Walt Whitman Society” so as to make clear that this group was focused on “Whitman Studies” instead of on gathering a group of Whitman fans. I ran an announcement of the Association in the final 1989 issue of WWQR: “The Whitman Studies Association is an organization of scholars dedicated to the encouragement of biographical, textual, cultural, and interpretive work involving Whitman. Membership in the organization is $13.00 per year and includes a subscription to the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, where announcements of WSA activities will appear regularly. Current subscribers to WWQR may join WSA for $1.00.” The idea was that, since most of other author societies had dues, the Whitman Studies Association would need them too. But, while a few people sent in the extra dollar (a year’s subscription to the journal at the time was $12), it soon became clear that it would be easier to simply let individual subscribers to WWQR—who by definition were interested in Whitman Studies—automatically become members of the WSA, which soon happened. This “fee structure” worked well until 2015, when WWQR became an online, open access journal and no longer had subscribers.

So the Whitman Studies Association has until very recently been more of a name than a true organization, a name that has allowed Whitman scholars to continue offering panels every year at the ALA annual conferences. In 1990, I worked with Jerry Loving to put together the first two Whitman panels at the first ALA conference—with Alan Trachtenberg, James E. Miller, Jr., Vivian Pollak, M. Jimmie Killingworth, Sherry Ceniza, and me. I then counted on these people, along with the WWQR Editorial Board, to help me organize panels over the next few years. When the Walt Whitman Archive got underway in the mid-1990s, co-directed by Kenneth M. Price and me, I included the scholars and staff associated with that project (which always has had a close affiliation with WWQR) to help me recruit and decide upon ALA panels. We regularly posted calls for panels and calls for papers in WWQR and on the Archive, and we have never had a problem filling up the two panels the WSA is guaranteed by ALA—some years we have requested three, a request that has always been honored.

Since WWQR has stopped having subscribers, the Whitman Studies Association has seemed more a half-fiction than an actual organization. Now that there is not the opprobrium surrounding a Whitman organization that we faced back in the 1970s and 1980s, it seemed a good time to set up by-laws, work on actual memberships, and become an actual author society like our 110 or so companion societies in ALA.

Iowa City, July 2026