Biography

Walt Whitman was born on May 31, 1819 in West Hills, Long Island, New York. His family was full of simple farm people with little formal education. His family moved to Brooklyn in 1823, where his father speculated in real estate and built cheap houses. Whitman attended public school and began to work at the age of 12, and learned the printing trade. He was employed as a printer in Brooklyn and New York City, became a teacher and taught in country schools on Long Island, and became a journalist. In 1846 he edited a newspaper called the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, but was discharged in 1848 because he was a supporter of the Free Soil Democratic Party. After that, Whitman traveled to New Orleans, Louisiana, where he worked for the Crescent for three months. During his stay in New Orleans Whitman was exposed to slavery for the first time and grew to oppose it. He returned to New York to work at another news paper but later was unemployed again. During his time in New York Whitman worked on a new form of poetic writing. In 1855, Whitman published Leaves of Grass, a thin volume of poems by Whitman. In 1862, Whitman went to Fredericksburg to help his brother who had been injured in the Civil War (in which Whitman disliked the war greatly) and then went to Washington and helped out in hospitals. He later became a clerk in the Department of Interior, but got dismissed because the secretary of the Interior had thought Leaves of Grass was indecent. In 1873, Whitman went to Camden, New Jersey after he healed from a stroke he suffered the same year. He went to help his brother care for dying mother and stayed there after she died

and lived with him. The previous year Whitman was known to be ill, the cause could have been the result of stress due to long-experience emotional strains related to his sexual ambiguity. After earning some money from publishing a new edition of Leaves of Grass, he bought a cottage in Camden. He spent the rest of his life there and died in 1892.