Walter Whitman

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his father a laborer, while his mother was a devout Quaker. Whitman was one of nine children and little is known about his youth except that two of his siblings were imbeciles. No wonder he demonstrated such an insight for life in his poems.
In 1830, at the age of eleven, he worked as an office boy for a lawyer, where he learned the printing trade. Whitman would soon take up teaching at various schools in Long Island. He also engaged in carpentry and house building while he edited newspapers. His early years seemed to show an active interest in working with the public.
Whitman at one time accepted a job with a New Orleans newspaper, and in doing so exposed himself to a great deal of the country. Getting to New Orleans required traveling over the Cumberland Gap and down rivers, of which he later wrote. America seemed to be both his home and inspiration. In "Calamus", part of his single book, Leaves of Grass, he writes of Louisiana as a "live oak growing", thus showing the joy ...

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of Grass, was first published on the fourth of July in 1855. He was thirty-six years old, not yet a published writer, and could not find any company willing to take a chance on his unusual style. His experience in newspapers allowed him to help publish his work himself, even setting up some of the type and distributing the first edition. To get a decent start, Whitman even went so far as to write complimentary unsigned reviews of his book which he had placed in the newspapers- "An American bard at last! "- his own words of his first work, showing his audacity to be well thought of. Whitman wrote only one book- Leaves of Grass- but he took a lifetime to write it, and he saw his one ...

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