Hal, In answer to your question (which came up only a few months ago on the Forum), this from my ALA paper on WW and MT: "Parallel though their lives were in terms of their vernacular styles and relentless dedication to American democracy, these two literary icons probably never met. The lone exception may have been at Whitman's ninth lecture on "The Death of Abraham Lincoln" at the Madison Square Theater in New York in 1887. Twain supposedly attended the event along with such American notables as Andrew Carnegie, William Dean Howells, and John Hay." But MT's name is not mentioned in any of the newspaper reports of the lecture, while the other writers are mentioned. See . Daniel Mark Esptein, Lincoln and Whitman: Parallel Lives in Civil War Washington (New York: Ballatine Books, 2004), 311, 323-24; and Jerome Loving, Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 450. Jerry