Beyond the Gray Leaf: The Life and Poems of J.P. Irvine - Paperback

by Dustin Renwick (Author)

Walt Whitman, John Burroughs, and J.P. Irvine represent a handful of the thousands of government clerks who worked in the nation's capital after the Civil War. But Irvine, a small-town poet from the Illinois prairies, was the one selected to address President Ulysses S. Grant and a crowd of 10,000 people on Memorial Day 1873. Those words were lost, along with the legacy of the man. Until now. This groundbreaking book weaves extensive original research and surprising historical stories with the rediscovered poems of this forgotten literary figure from 19th-century America.