Walt Whitman Speaks: His Final Thoughts on Life, Writing, Spirituality, and the Promise of America

About Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman (born 1819) is widely considered to be the greatest of all American poets. Largely self-taught he read voraciously including works by the great classic writers Homer Dante Shakespeare. In 1836 at the age of 17 he began his career as a teacher and continued to teach until 1841 when he turned to journalism as a full-time career. He founded a weekly newspaper Long-Islander and later edited a number of Brooklyn and New York papers. As well as journalism Whitman became absorbed in poetry writing in a unique and distinctive style. In 1855 he finished his seminal work Leaves of Grass. He died in 1892.; Brenda Wineapple is the author of Ecstatic Nation: Confidence Crisis and Compromise 1848-1877 a New York Times Notable Book and White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. For Library of America she has edited John Greenleaf Whittier: Selected Poems volume 10 in the American Poets Project. Wineapple has received a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters a Guggenheim fellowship a Pushcart Prize and most recently a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholars Award for The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation.