Now the Drum of War—and an Interview with the Author
Coming up this week, we’re pleased to present a multi-part interview by Rob Couteau with Robert Roper, author of the new book Now the Drum of War: Walt Whitman and His Brothers in the Civil War.
Rob Couteau is a writer and visual artist from Brooklyn. His poetry, fiction, essays, and interviews have appeared in over thirty-five magazines, newspapers, anthologies, and literary publications. He’s the author of the novel Doctor Pluss; the literary anthology Collected Couteau (both reviewed in the Evergreen Review), the epistolary memoir Letters from Paris, and the poetry collection The Sleeping Mermaid (with an Introduction by Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno). In 1985 he won the North American Essay Award, a competition open to writers throughout North America and sponsored by the American Humanist Association.
His work as a literary critic, interviewer, and social commentator has been featured in several books, such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera: A Reader’s Guide, by Thomas Fahy, Conversations with Ray Bradbury, ed. Steven Aggelis, and David Cohen’s Forgotten Millions, a book about the homeless mentally ill.
So glad to see this. Goodheart’s 1861 reminded a lot of folks about Whitman, including me. I got a copy of collected works, and try to read a couple each night before bed. It makes me remember my grandmother, who knew the Lilacs poem about AL’s death. I am interested in following this, certainly!