The main reason previous biographers have passed over this rumor [of Whitman’s 1840-41 sexual molestation charge in Southold] is that in the winters of 1840 and 1841 Whitman’s whereabouts are fairly well documented as being at the other end of Long Island from Southold, a town next to Smithtown, where he did teach in the fall and winter terms of 1837-1838. Molinoff concedes at the outset of her pamphlet that there is no evidence of Whitman’s having taught any farther east than Smithtown, but then immediately forgets that important information to state on p. 5 that he taught at the Locust Grove School in Southold (later called “Sodom School”—not because of Whitman’s alleged sex crime, as Reynolds suggests, but because the shed-like schoolhouse was situated next to a graveyard, i. e., with reference to the biblical fates of Sodom and Gomorrah).

 . . . . In a sense, Molinoff did Whitman scholarship a service by gathering together the contradictory fragments that make up the Southold story; her pamphlet allows us to easily dismiss the story.

-Jerome Loving

         Jerome Loving, Review of Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography by David S. Reynolds (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), in Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 12.4 (Spring 1995): 257-261.