Event Description:
Andrew Rimby presents “The Traveling Bachelor in Huntington Village: A Whitman Walking Tour.”
Video Link: https://youtu.be/ligxpA36tn0
WWBA is delighted to present “The Traveling Bachelor in Huntington Village: A Whitman Walking Tour” with Andrew Rimby, a PhD Candidate focusing his dissertation on Walt Whitman life and literary legacy. An exciting live virtual Zoom tour of Huntington Village, located in Long Island, NY.
While working as a journalist, in 1849, in Brooklyn, Whitman makes a journey to visit his relatives in the Huntington area. He provides a personal account of his journey both on foot and on the recently built Long Island Railroad in his “Letters from a Travelling Bachelor.” He begins his journey in Huntington Village where he had created The Long-Islander (now known as Long Islander News). Whitman called Huntington “one of the prettiest villages of the island,” and in the case of life imitating art, I’ll be taking you on a historic trip through Huntington Village. I’ll discuss which structures Whitman would have seen when working at The Long-Islander and a few sites that Whitman would surely approve of.
Andrew Rimby is a Ph.D. Candidate in the English department at SBU. His dissertation, “The Pool of Narcissus: Transatlantic Homoerotic Attachments (1837-1901), argues that Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, and other 19th-century writers use ancient Greek allusions to express male homoerotic desire before the term “homosexuality” is invented. He is a 2019 Guiliano Global Fellow, a 2019-2020 Public Humanities Fellow, and a 2019 Stony Brook Graduate Fellow in the Arts, Humanities, and Lettered Social Sciences.
