Walt Whitman, son of Walt Whitman Sr. and Louisa Van Velsor, was born on May 31, 1819 in a Long Island, New York farmhouse.  When he was four, the family moved closer to the city into Brooklyn.  Walt had to quit going to school at age eleven to help support his family.  He took a few odd jobs until finding something he especially enjoyed—editing, printing, and contributing to newspapers.  Walt primarily worked at that trade for the following five years.

            Walt gained much inspiration during his adolescence.  He would use his press pass to get into theater and opera performances.  He also read voraciously—everything he could get his hands on.  Because his education was cut short, Walt was mostly self-taught through his lust for enlightenment.

            Following a loss of work in the city, Walt headed back to Long Island to take a few teaching positions over the next five years.  Towards the end of this career, he started up his own newspaper called The Long Islander.  In it, he would express his liberal positions on current world affairs.  With a renewed taste for writing, Walt returned to New York City to work at several newspapers over the next eight years:  New World, Aurora, Tatler, Eagle, and Democrat; some of which he was fired from for apparent laziness or conflicting political views.  For a brief time in 1948, Walt was in New Orleans to work on a paper called Crescent.

            Back in New York, he took a job as a carpenter to support himself while he began to write Leaves of Grass, his poetic collection.  He published the first edition of it himself in 1855.  He gained little response from this work aside from that of the Transcendentalists, some of which came to visit him.  Emerson was especially impressed with Walt’s Leaves of Grass and, in a letter to him, was said to have rubbed his eyes some "to see if the sunbeam was no illusion."

Meanwhile, Walt continued to revise Leaves of Grass and another collection of poems, Live Oak with Moss, which told of a relationship with another man.  He couldn’t publish this at that time, of course, so instead he wove it into Leaves of Grass with poems about a man’s love for a woman to offset his homosexual poetry.  He would continue to work on these collections until the Civil War broke out and then worked at a hospital in Washington.  Walt would dress wounds and comfort the wounded and dying soldiers.  From his war experience, he wrote the Drum-Taps collection.  But Walt’s work on that was interrupted when President Lincoln was assassinated in 1865.  As a tribute and elegy to him, Walt Whitman composed the When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d collection of poems.

Then, still in the nation’s capital, Walt went to work for the Department of the Interior briefly until his supervisor dismissed him for the sexual and unsavory content of Leaves of Grass.  Walt managed to move to a position as a clerk in the attorney general’s office for the next seven years.  But, of course, his primary concern was still writing.  He incorporated Drum-Taps into his life’s work, Leaves of Grass, and was continually revising it as well.  He also published Specimen Days in this time and had gained a small following of other artists and important people who sympathized with him and his work.

In 1873, when Walt was only 54, he had to leave Washington to recover from a paralytic stroke.  He stayed with his brother in Camden, New Jersey for some eleven years until purchasing a shack in Camden to spend the rest of his days.  Although Whitman was growing weak and confined to a wheelchair, he would still write new groups of poems, such as November Boughs and Passage to India, and revise his Leaves of Grass.  He revised about eight distinct versions of this massive collection in his lifetime.  Then, in 1892, Walt Whitman died from several years of illness, failing health, and another stroke.  He was buried in Harleigh Cemetery in Camden where, today, scholars often pay their respects to Walt by leaving blades of grass on his grave.