Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman (1819-1892) was born on May 31, 1819, to a large, working-class family in Long Island. However, when Whitman was just four years old the family relocated to the growing city of Brooklyn. By the age of eleven he had finished his formal education and started work as a labourer. His first paid position was the role of office boy for a group of prominent Brooklyn lawyers, who gave him a subscription to a circulating library. Whitman subsequently became an avid reader, and would frequently visit the cities museums, self-educating himself across a variety of disciplines through the developing public resources of America's fastest growing city. Throughout his adult life he worked in a variety of different roles: teacher, printer, and writer, contributing to newspapers and magazines across the United States. During the American Civil War (1861-1865) he volunteered as a nurse, working amongst the wounded in field hospitals. This experience influenced his wartime poems Drum Taps (1865), and his later autobiographical prose work Specimen Days (1882). Walt Whitman, from Ohio Wesleyan University, Bayley Collection via The Walt Whitman Archive Leaves of...