In 1858, Walt Whitman, at the age of thirty-nine, was eking out a living as a journalist at the Brooklyn Daily Times, generating thousands of words a week at an unflagging pace. Critics had variously shrugged and gawped at the first edition of his “Leaves of Grass,” published three years before. Adrift and demoralized, Whitman cultivated a bohemian image and dreamed of reinventing himself as a travelling orator. Instead, that fall, he attached himself to a more mundane endeavor, as the author of a series of advice columns for the New York Atlas on the topic of men’s health. Given the rubric “Manly Health and Training,” these were published under the pseudonym Mose Velsor.
In the columns, Whitman implores men to do things briskly: walking, showering, rubbing themselves down with dry cloths and hair gloves. He likes stale bread and fresh air; he foresees the rise of athletic footwear, noting that “the shoe now specially worn by the base-ball players” should be “introduced for general use.”
