Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) was an American poet, born on Long Island and raised in Brooklyn, where he worked as a printer, schoolteacher and newspaper editor before publishing the first edition of Leaves of Grass at his own expense in 1855. Emerson wrote to greet him at the beginning of a great career; most reviewers were appalled by his free verse and his frankness about the body. Whitman spent the Civil War nursing wounded soldiers in Washington hospitals, the experience behind Drum-Taps, and worked as a government clerk until a stroke in 1873 left him an invalid in Camden, New Jersey. He kept enlarging Leaves of Grass until his death.