In February 2017, Zachary Turpin, a doctoral candidate at the University of Houston, unearthed from the depths of the Library of Congress one of the most important literary finds of recent times: The Life and Adventures of Jack Engle, the previously unknown novel by the influential American poet Walt Whitman. With a Dickensian influence, it was written anonymously in 1952 and published in six installments in the weekly New York Sunday Dispatch.