Some of the dimmest years in Walt Whitman's life precede the advent of Leaves of Grass in 1855, when he was working as a jour-nalist and fiction writer. Starting around 1850, what he'd begun writing in his personal notebooks was far more enigmatic than anything he'd done before.One of Whitman s most secretive projects during this timeframe was a novel, Life and Adventures of Jack Engle; serialized anonymously in the spring of 1852, and rediscovered and properly published in 2017. The key to the novel s later discovery were plot notes Whit man had made in one of his private notebooks.Whitman s invaluable notebooks have been virtually inacces sible to the public, until now. Maintaining the early notebooks wild, syncretic feel and sample illustrations of Whitman s beauti ful and unkempt pages, scholars Zachary Turpin and Matt Miller s thorough transcriptions have made these notebooks available to all; sharing Whitman s secret space for developing his poetry, his writing, his philosophy, and himself.