O'Higgins makes a mention of Whitman's involvement with a pre-Pfaff's group of bohemians. O'Higgins, quoting one of Whitman's unnamed friends, writes that Whitman wrote his novella Franklin Evans; or The Indbriate "mostly in the reading room of Tammany Hall, which was a sort of Bohemian resort, and he afterwards told me that he frequently indulged in gin cocktails, while writing it, at the 'Pewter Mug,' another resort for Bohemians around the corner in Spruce Street" (13).
O'Higgins also includes a discussion of Whitman's sexual orientation and says that Whitman "was arrested in his sexual development very near the homosexual level, as several of his poems show" (35).
