Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman was born in 1819 on Long Island, the second of nine children of a carpenter, and left school at eleven. An apprentice printer, a schoolteacher, then a journalist and editor of Brooklyn papers, he lost one of these posts for having refused the extension of slavery. During the Civil War, having gone to look for his wounded brother, he stayed in Washington and spent three years visiting wounded men in the hospitals. A stroke left him half paralysed in 1873. He died in Camden, New Jersey, in 1892.

In the catalogue 1

• PoetryLeaves of GrassWalt Whitman · 1855LiteraturePublic domain