Abstract
From the end of the Civil War to the beginning of the Jazz Age, Pittsburgher Wilson Howell Carpenter—"Wilse" to his friends—kept a journal, a document in three volumes that contains more than 200,000 words, now preserved in the Thomas & Katherine Detre Library & Archives at the Heinz History Center. Within those journals he articulated the desires of his heart, among them, to be a writer of fiction (he wrote a novel and several short stories, which were never published and are presumably lost), to be a husband (he never found a wife), and to have what his near-contemporary Walt Whitman would have called a same-sex comrade (he seems to have found one of those).
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