Walt Whitman In this brief biography of Whitman written for Oxford University Press's "Lives and Legacies" series, Reynolds draws upon the research from his much longer <cite>Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography</cite>.

In a short section on the Pfaff's period, Reynolds identifies a number of fellow writers with whom Whitman fraternized at the New York City bar, including Fitz-Hugh Ludlow, William Dean Howells, and Bram Stoker, whom he identifies as "the Poe-like writer of Gothic tales" (15). Conventional scholarly wisdom has been that Whitman met Stoker, the author of <cite>Dracula</cite>, in 1884 in Philadelphia. Reynolds does not cite a source to support Whitman's meeting with Stoker during the Pfaff's period.

Reynolds also refers to the "Live Oak with Moss" sequence of poems that Whitman wrote during this period, a sequence that would form the core of the much longer "Calamus" cluster in the 1860 edition of <cite>Leaves of Grass</cite>. Reynolds says that the sequence "describes the joys and pains of an intense but ill-fated relationship with a man" (16).