Voices in the Dead House

The ninth stand-alone book in Lock’s “American Novels” series (following Tooth of the Covenant) details the lives of Walt Whitman and Louisa May Alcott during a brief time in 1863 when they were both volunteering at hospitals in Washington, DC, during the Civil War. Alcott and Whitman never met in real life, but the broad outline of the story is factual, and Lock convincingly writes in the voices of his subjects. Whitman works in the army paymaster’s office and tends to injured and dying soldiers at the Armory Square Hospital in his free time. Alcott is a nurse at the more dismal Union Hotel Hospital, where disease runs rampant and unhygienic amputations are carried out, until she contracts typhoid and has to return home to recover. Alcott’s abolitionist views starkly contrast with Whitman’s racism, and in the afterword, Lock addresses how disconcerting it was to discover Whitman’s personal views when his published work often challenged the prejudices of his time.