Is that Jon Hamm’s voice reading Walt Whitman?
Why, yes. Yes it is. ‘Mad Man’ star (and English major) is fan of 19th-century poet
Don Draper and the Bard of Brooklyn: An unlikely pairing. But there they are together, in headphones near you.
Last year, a University of Houston grad student uncovered a previously unknown novel written by Walt Whitman, the 19th-century poet best known for “Leaves of Grass.” Now that book — which might well have been of interest mainly to Whitman scholars — appears to have a chance at being an audiobook bestseller: It’s narrated by “Mad Men” actor Jon Hamm.
Zachary Turpin was searching 1850s newspapers for references to character names in Whitman’s notebooks when he found an ad for “Life and Adventures of Jack Engle: An Auto-Biography; A Story of New York at the Present Time in which the Reader Will Find Some Familiar Characters.”
Turpin followed the novella’s trail to Manhattan’s “Sunday Dispatch,” the three-penny weekly that published the potboiler six-part series in 1852, without Whitman’s name. After much excitement in the world of Whitman scholars, the University of Iowa Press published “Jack Engle” in February. Now the Penguin Random House Audio version is out — and with a major star attached.
Hamm tells Entertainment Weekly that he’s a fan of Whitman.
“You can definitely tell Jon was an English major,” says the audiobook’s producer, Sarah Jaffe, in a Penguin Random House Audio blog post. She said he knew how to smooth out the “long, antiquated sentence structure” filled with difficult names and archaic language.
It’s likely that Whitman wrote the potboiler orphan makes-good novel as a moneymaking venture. It’s a world away from Whitman’s poetry. But early reviewers have mainly approved.
“If ‘Jack Engle’ is not a work of art, it is entertaining, especially if you have a taste for 19thcentury melodrama,” audiobook reviewer Katharine A. Powers wrote in the Washington Post.
“Like Dickens on speed,” enthused Tyson, a one-name reviewer on Audible.com, where the book currently rates four out of a possible five stars.
This isn’t Hamm’s first foray into audiobooks. He narrated some of John O’Hara’s “New York Stories” in 2014, and in 2011 he was cast in an L.A. Theatre Works production of Anton Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” that was turned into an audiobook.
And obviously, Hamm’s not the first big-name celebrity to narrate a book. Anne Hathaway, Colin Firth, Meryl Streep, Samuel L. Jackson — they’ve all lent their voices to literature. But none of their books came from the 19th century or a university press.
Hamm’s name on this particular book lends a surprising element of celebrity squee, boosting the potential audience of “Jack Engle” far beyond the English professors and Whitman geeks who read the book in print.