Walt Whitman

His father put money into Brooklyn houses and lost it, and the second of nine children went out to work at 11. He was an office boy for two lawyers, then a printer's devil on a Long Island weekly, then a compositor in Manhattan at 16, then a country schoolteacher who disliked the job. At 19 he founded his own paper, the Long-Islander, and sold it within a year. He edited the New York Aurora and then the Brooklyn Eagle, which fired him in 1848 for siding with the free-soil faction against its owner. He wrote a temperance novel in three days for the money and later called it damned rot. He also reviewed Italian opera, and said afterward that without it there would have been no Leaves of Grass.

The first printing in 1855 was at his own expense: 795 copies, and no author's name on the title page. Emerson sent a private letter of praise and Whitman stamped a line from it in gold leaf on the next spine without asking. On the 1860 cover he perched a butterfly on his finger and let readers assume it was alive, when it was cloth and wired on. That publisher went bankrupt and paid him 250 dollars. BriefHistory carries the poems and the war that changed them. This page is about the man doing the wiring.

The poet of an inclusive democracy also held that free Black Americans should not vote, and wrote of the ones entering southern legislatures that they had about as much intellect and calibre in the mass as so many baboons. He opposed the spread of slavery largely because it threatened free white labor, and distrusted abolitionists as bad for the democratic process. The scholars George Hutchinson and David Drews concluded that he never reconciled the country's racism with its stated ideals, or the same split inside himself. There was a second denial. John Addington Symonds spent 20 years asking what the Calamus poems meant, and in 1890 Whitman answered that such inferences were damnable and that he had fathered six illegitimate children. No trace of them has ever been found.

He ordered a granite mausoleum shaped like a house, paid 4,000 dollars for it, and went to watch the masons at work. He was buried there four days after his death, and his parents and two of his brothers were later moved in with him. His brain went to the American Anthropometric Society in Philadelphia, where it was destroyed by accident. When New Jersey put his name on a Delaware River bridge in 1957, objectors wrote in that his view of humanity sounded like communism. The manuscripts keep arriving: a University of Houston graduate student identified 47,000 words of his pseudonymous health writing in 2016 and, the year after, a whole novel serialized in 1852 and unread since.

Walt Whitman's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Franklin Evans, or The Inebriate book
  A temperance novel he said he wrote in three days for money 1842
• Leaves of Grass book
  Self-published, 795 copies, twelve untitled poems, no author named 1855
• Manly Health and Training article
  47,000 words under the name Mose Velsor, unread again until 2016 1858
• Drum-Taps book
  The war poems, published the year Lincoln was shot 1865
• Democratic Vistas book
  His prose argument about what a democracy owes its own culture 1871
• Specimen Days book
  Notebook prose of the war, the hospitals and the New Jersey countryside 1882

• May 31, 1819 aged 0 Born on a farm at West Hills, Long Island The family moved to Brooklyn when he was four, after his father's investments failed.
• 1831 aged ~12 Leaves school at 11 and goes to work Office boy, then printer's devil at the Long Island Patriot.
• 1838 aged ~19 Founds the Long-Islander at Huntington at 19 He sold it after about ten months.
• 1848 aged ~29 The Brooklyn Eagle fires him over free-soil politics He went that year as a delegate to the founding convention of the Free Soil Party.
• 1855 aged ~36 Pays for the first Leaves of Grass himself 795 copies, printed at a local shop, with no author's name on the title page.
• December 16, 1862 aged 43 A casualty list sends him south to look for his brother The paper had garbled the name. George Whitman was alive, with a cut cheek.
• June 30, 1865 aged 46 Interior Secretary James Harlan dismisses him from his clerkship Friends got him a place at the Attorney General's office the next day.
• 1873 aged ~54 A paralytic stroke, then his mother's death, then Camden He moved into his brother George's house on Stevens Street and stayed 11 years.
• March 1, 1882 aged 62 The district attorney of Boston calls the book obscene literature Whitman refused every cut. A Philadelphia house reprinted it and sold out in a day.

• Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803–1882
  Essayist and philosopher who led the Transcendentalist movement and shaped American intellectual thought. blurbed by
• Abraham Lincoln 1809–1865
  16th President who preserved the Union during the Civil War and issued the Emancipation Proclamation. elegized
• Thomas Eakins 1844–1916
  Realist painter celebrated for his anatomically precise portraits and scenes of athletes and surgeons. painted by
• William Lloyd Garrison 1805–1879
  Editor of The Liberator and founder of the American Anti-Slavery Society. opposed on tactics
• Langston Hughes 1901–1967
  Harlem Renaissance poet and writer whose work celebrated Black life and challenged racial injustice. wrote in his line