O'Connor, William Douglas

O'Connor, William Douglas( 1832–89),
journalist and minor government official, is best known for The Good Gray Poet (1866), a defense of his friend Whitman written upon the latter's dismissal from a governmental clerkship. The title of his book gave the poet his sobriquet. Whitman in turn wrote a preface for O'Connor's posthumous collection Three Tales (1892), containing The Carpenter, and idealized Christ-like depiction of the poet. O'Connor was also the author of an Abolitionist novel, Harrington (1860), and of two pamphlets that contended that Bacon was the author of Shakespeare's plays.