Alias Walt Whitman This brief (50-page) booklet was written, as the prefatory note explains, to "expose[] a number of weaknesses or worse, in the character of an overlauded personality about whom have grown up many legends, apocryphal and otherwise" (5-6). Like Esther Shepherd's <cite>Walt Whitman's Pose</cite>, which was written during the same period, this book attempts to de-bunk Whitman's democratic posturing as "Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs." There is brief mention of Whitman's affiliation with a pre-Pfaff's bohemain group (13), but no mention of the Pfaff's period per se.