Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) was born on Long Island and worked as a printer, schoolteacher and newspaper editor in Brooklyn and New York before publishing, at his own expense, the first Leaves of Grass in 1855 — a book he enlarged and revised through successive editions until the year of his death. During the Civil War he nursed wounded soldiers in Washington hospitals (Drum-Taps, 1865). Paralysed by a stroke in 1873, he spent his last years in Camden, New Jersey.