Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman was born in 1819 in West Hills, on Long Island, New York, the second of nine children, and grew up mainly in Brooklyn. He left school at eleven and worked as an office boy, a printer's apprentice and a teacher before becoming a journalist. In 1855 he published, at his own expense, the first edition of Leaves of Grass, a book of poems written in long, unrhymed lines of free verse that celebrated democracy, nature, the human body and ordinary American life. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote to praise it, but many readers were shocked by its frankness. Whitman revised and expanded the book for the rest of his life, publishing many editions. During the Civil War he moved to Washington, D.C., where he worked as a government clerk and cared for wounded soldiers in the hospitals. After the death of Abraham Lincoln he wrote the elegies 'O Captain! My Captain!' and 'When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd'. In 1873 he suffered a stroke and moved to Camden, New Jersey, where he lived for the rest of his life. He died there in 1892.

Walt Whitman is also an author in the library: author page and works.

Faith: Deeply influenced by deism. Source: Wikipedia