Gary Schmidgall is a professor of English at Hunter College, the City University of New York, and the editor of Intimate with Walt: Selections from Whitman's Conversations with Horace Traubel, 1888-1892 (Iowa, 2001). His other Whitman books are Walt Whitman: A Gay Life and Walt Whitman: Selected Poems 1855-1892. He has also published books on Shakespeare and on the relation between literature and opera, as well as a biography of Oscar Wilde.