This is the grass that grows wherever the land is and the water is, This is the common air that bathes the globe. --Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

This 1854 steel engraving was used as a frontispiece for the first edition of "Leaves of Grass."

Walt Whitman was born on May 31, 1819 on Long Island. Largely self- taught and a voracious reader,he began his career as a teacher at age 17 in the one-room school houses of Long Island where he continued until 1841 when he turned to journalism as a full-time career. He founded a weekly newspaper, the Long-Islander, and later edited a number of Brooklyn and New York papers and in 1848 Whitman briefly became the editor of the New Orleans Crescent. On his return to Brooklyn in the fall of 1848, he founded a "free soil" newspaper, the Brooklyn Freeman, and continued to develop the unique style of poetry that later so astonished Ralph Waldo Emerson.

By the year 1855, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Stowe, Fuller, Thoreau, and Emerson had published. America was creating a sophisticated publishing industry producing distinctly "American" books. It was in this year that Whitman took out a copyright on the first edition of Leaves of Grass, which consisted of twelve untitled poems and a preface. He published the volume himself, and sent a copy to Ralph Waldo Emerson in July of 1855. Whitman released a second edition of the book in 1856, containing thirty-three poems, a letter from Emerson praising the first edition, and a long open letter by Whitman in response. During his subsequent career, Whitman continued to refine the volume, publishing a total of 9 editions by his death in 1892. Whitman maintained that a poet's style should be simple and natural, without orthodox meter or rhyme. At the center of his poetry lies a democratic desire for equality and brotherhood, with movement forward rather than a dependence on the corrupted past.

In 1995, the Library of Congress re-acquired four of the original 24 early Whitman notebooks. A gift of Thomas B. Harned of Philadelphia in 1918, the notebooks were secreted away during World War ll for safekeeping, but on their return ten of the books were missing. The return of these missing four generated new research for Whitman scholars.

Medium: 1 photographic print on card mount : albumen, 1873

Medium: 1 print : steel engraving by Hollinger

Frame size 17 1/4 X 13 1/4. Black with curved edge.

From the Fienberg/Whitman Collection in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress

Price: $85.00

Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 weeks

Product #: FR0044