Walt Whitman, Journalist

Walt Whitman has long been described as a poet with a foreground in journalism. Drawing on a wealth of recently rediscovered writings by Whitman between 1856 and 1860, Walt Whitman, Journalist breaks with this framing and instead presents an author, who — even after the initial publication of Leaves of Grass in 1855 — remained primarily a newspaper writer. In this book, a team of researchers from the Walt Whitman Archive excavates the many layers of Whitman’s writerly identity that have remained hidden from scholars and readers: a reporter and editor for the Brooklyn Daily Times, a newspaper innovator, a self-help author, a compiler of geographic primers, a partisan political advocate, an advice columnist and many more. Whitman in the late 1850s, this book contends, was no mere poet-in-waiting but a professional journalist and a keen strategist pursuing multiple projects and literary futures in the press.