Life and Adventures of Jack Engle

An Auto-Biography; A Story of New York at the Present Time in which the Reader Will Find Some Familiar Characters

By: Walt Whitman, Zachary Turpin

Narrated by: Jon Hamm

In 1852, young Walt Whitman—a down-on-his-luck housebuilder in Brooklyn—was hard at work writing two books. One would become one of the most famous volumes of poetry in American history, a free-verse revelation beloved the world over, Leaves of Grass. The other, a novel, would be published under a pseudonym and serialized in a newspaper. A short, rollicking story of orphanhood, avarice, and adventure in New York City, Life and Adventures of Jack Engle appeared to little fanfare.

Then it disappeared.

No one laid eyes on it until 2016, when literary scholar Zachary Turpin, University of Houston, followed a paper trail deep into the Library of Congress, where the sole surviving copy of Jack Engle has lain waiting for generations. Now, after more than 160 years, the University of Iowa Press is honored to reprint this lost work, restoring a missing piece of American literature by one of the world’s greatest authors, written as he verged on immortality.


Read by Jon Hamm, with an afterword written and read by Zachary Turpin

Whitman at his best

I thoroughly enjoyed the words as written by Walt Whitman and the words as spoken by Jon Hamm. The narrative has not lost its relevance in the passage of 160+ years. I also was entranced by the afterword by Zachary Turpin and thank him for his scholarship and persistence in restoring Jack Engle to life.