Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman was an American poet, essayist, and journalist whose 40-year writing career produced one of the foundational documents of 19th-century American literature — particularly his 1855 first edition of Leaves of Grass, which has been continuously cited as the founding work of American poetic free verse. He was born Walter Whitman on May 31, 1819, in West Hills, Long Island, New York, into an American working-class family. His father Walter Whitman Sr. was a Long Island farmer and carpenter, and his mother Louisa Van Velsor Whitman was a homemaker. The family relocated to Brooklyn in 1823, where Whitman lived through his early adulthood.

His education at Brooklyn public schools (1825–1830) ended when he was 11 to begin his early-career path as a printer's apprentice. His subsequent 1830–1855 quarter-century of journalism work — across multiple New York newspapers including the Long Island Patriot, the New York Aurora, the Brooklyn Eagle (where he served as editor 1846–1848), and the Brooklyn Daily Times — produced his foundational literary education and his exposure to American working-class life that would shape his later poetry.

His July 4, 1855 self-publication of the first edition of Leaves of Grass — a 12-poem 95-page collection that he typeset and printed himself at the Brooklyn print shop of friends Andrew and James Rome — has been continuously cited as one of the foundational documents of American literature. The collection's free-verse poetry, its democratic celebration of common American working-class experience, and its frank treatment of the body and sexuality made it both controversial and influential.

His Civil War nursing service across 1862–1865 — when he traveled to the Washington, D.C. area in late 1862 to find his wounded brother George Washington Whitman after the Battle of Fredericksburg, and remained in Washington as a volunteer nurse to wounded Union soldiers across the next three years — produced his 1865 collection Drum-Taps and his foundational elegy "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" (mourning the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln). His Leaves of Grass was expanded across nine editions across 1855–1892. He died on March 26, 1892, at age 72, in Camden, New Jersey, of pneumonia and tuberculosis.

His name Walt is the English short form of Walter (from the Old Germanic root meaning "ruler of the army"). Walt has been a popular American boys' name across the 19th and 20th centuries.