William Douglas‏ O'Connor

William Douglas O'Connor (January 2, 1832 – May 9, 1889) was an American author, known in part for his association with Walt Whitman. In 1866 he authored The Good Gray Poet, a pamphlet defending Whitman.

Early and personal life Born in Boston, Massachusetts on January 2, 1832, William O'Connor was a son of Peter D. O'Connor and an unknown mother. Little is known about his early childhood other than that he had a disagreement with his father and left the house when he was eight years old. In 1856 he married Ellen M. Tarr; the couple had two children.

Career In the 1850s he met Sarah Helen Whitman, a poet and romantic interest of Edgar Allan Poe. Whitman influenced him and O'Connor published several poems similar to Poe's work, and several stories in Putnam's Magazine and Harper's Magazine. From 1856 to 1860 he worked at The Saturday Evening Post in Philadelphia. While at the paper he wrote on the Shakespeare authorship question, proposing that Francis Bacon had written some of Shakespeare's works. As part of these efforts, O'Connor defended Delia Bacon's scholarship on the matter. He was outraged when James Harlan fired Whitman from the Bureau in 1865 and quickly wrote a pamphlet, titled The Good Gray Poet (1866), defending Whitman and attacking Harlan. Several of his works were published posthumously in The Three Tales. Whitman wrote a preface to the book.