A “rollicking” anti-lawyer revenge fantasy by Walt Whitman, which challenges previously held ideas about the American poet’s transition from prose to poetry, has been found in the archives of a Victorian New York Sunday newspaper. Though published anonymously, the book matches a detailed synopsis in the poet’s notebook for a project academics had thought abandoned.

Walt Whitman revealed as author of 'Manly Health' guide Read more

Entitled The Life and Adventures of Jack Engle, the book has just been published free online by the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review. Announcing the discovery unearthed in Whitman materials held at the Library of Congress, Ed Folsom, editor of the journal, said the discovery would change everything previously known about the author’s early writing career. “Now we see that the fiction and poetry were mingling in ways we never before knew,” he said.

Zachary Turpin of the University of Houston discovered the novel in Manhattan-based newspaper the Sunday Dispatch. Set in New York, it was serialised in 1852 and written at the same time as the poet began work on his landmark epic poem Leaves of Grass, published three years later.

Described by Turpin as “a fun, rollicking, creative, twisty, bizarre little book”, Jack Engle is a classic rags-to-riches orphan’s story about a corrupt lawyer, Mr Covert, who tries to trick his ward Martha out of her inheritance. Jack, who works for Covert, sets out to save his fellow orphan and in the process discovers his fate is tied up with hers. In true Dickensian style, Whitman appears to settle old scores in the book: the writer’s father was also swindled by a New York lawyer.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The announcement of Whitman’s novel

Turpin found the 36,000-word novel as he ploughed through the prolific author’s “odds and ends” in the Integrated Catalog of Walt Whitman’s Literary Manuscripts, a comprehensive list of the poet’s surviving papers, jottings, manuscript drafts, scraps and notebooks. Among the scraps, a series of character names appeared: Covert, Jack Engle, Wigglesworth and Smytthe. Painstaking detective work led him to a tiny notice from 1852 in the New York Daily Times (now the New York Times) advertising the serialisation in the Sunday Dispatch of an autobiography, The Life and Adventures of Jack Engle.

“Something about it just seemed right,” the academic said. “The name Jack Engle. The year. The newspaper (to which we know Whitman had contributed before).” The clincher came when he matched the character names from Whitman’s notebook with those in the published story. “I couldn’t believe that, for a few minutes, I was the only person on Earth who knew about this book.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The opening of The Life and Adventures of Jack Engle. Photograph: Walt Whitman Quarterly Review

The discovery is significant not only for its rarity. The extent of Whitman’s prose fiction was previously unknown. The book reveals he grappled with a desire to find the right form in which to express his ideas. “The Whitman we see in Jack Engle is not yet the confident, committed poet we now take him to have always been,” Turpin explained. “It is during this vital time that he’s experimenting, trying on different genres and modes of writing, looking for one that’s ample and expansive enough to express what [Ralph Waldo] Emerson would call ‘the infinitude of the private man’.”

Folsom agreed the novel revealed Whitman’s struggle with form and that it gives a precise time for his move into poetry. In chapter 19, the plot comes to an abrupt end as Jack wanders through a graveyard and the plots of the buried merge into endless lost life stories. As he contemplates these lost plots, Jack feel the grass covering his own face. Folsom said: “I sense at this moment Whitman is discovering why conventional plots will no longer serve for the kind of writing he feels he has to accomplish, and this novel thus lets us experience the moment in the process of Whitman’s development when he realises fiction simply will not serve the kind of creative work he will devote the rest of his life to.”

A revival in Whitman’s work may be due. Prized for his originality, compassion, idealism and democratic patriotism, the poet saw himself as a prophet for what the US might become. “The Whitman of the early 1850s is absolutely ablaze,” said Turpin, who has form in finding unusual lost works by Whitman. Last year, he discovered a book-length guide to “manly health” by the poet, which tackled everything from virility to foot care and exercise. Hinting that more may be mined from the archives, Turpin added: “This new novel may also indicate that he didn’t give up prose. God knows – he could have, and probably did, write several more novels, if not many more than that. For all we know, they could be hiding in plain sight. Exciting, isn’t it?”