Franklin Evans (Annotated)

Franklin Evans; or, The Inebriate is Walt Whitman's 1842 temperance novel, a work of popular reform fiction far removed from the expansive free verse that later made him canonical. Following a young man's descent through alcohol, seduction, urban temptation, and moral ruin, the book combines melodrama, sentimental pathos, and didactic social warning. Its episodic structure and sensational incident...