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Walt Whitman, "[I celebrate myself and sing myself]"

BIOGRAPHY

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[From The Norton Introduction to Literature]

(1819–1892)

Walt Whitman was born on a farm in West Hills, Long Island, to a British father and a Dutch mother. After working as a journalist throughout New York for many years, he taught for a while and founded his own newspaper, The Long Islander, in 1838; he then left journalism to work on Leaves of Grass, originally intended as a poetic treatise on American democratic idealism. Published privately in multiple editions from 1855 to 1874, the book at first failed to reach a mass audience. In 1881, Boston's Osgood and Company published another edition of Leaves of Grass, which sold well until the district attorney called it “obscene literature” and stipulated that Whitman remove certain poems and phrases. He refused, and it was many years before his works were again published, this time in Philadelphia. By the time Whitman died, his work was revered, as it still is today, for its greatness of spirit and its exuberant American voice.

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