10 interesting facts of Walt Whitman:
1- He was the second son of Walt Whitman and Loisa Van Velsor and he had 8 siblings.
2-He worked as a printer in New York City.
3-When he was 17 he began working as a teacher in the school hoeses of Long Island.
4-In 1841 he began jorking as a journalist and founded a weekly newspaper called “Long-Islander”
5-the he began working as an editor in New York.
6-In 1855, Whitman took out a copyright on the first edition of Leaves of Grass (self-published), which consisted of twelve untitled poems and a preface.
7-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
8-He wrote freelance journalism and visited the wounded at New York-area hospitals. He then traveled to Washington, D.C. in December 1862 to care for his brother who had been wounded in the Civil War.
9-Whitman chose to stay in Washington D.C. working as a clerk for the department of the Interior, which ended when the Secretary of the Interior, James Harlan, discovered that Whitman was the author of Leaves of Grass, which Harlan found offensive.
10-Whitman spent his declining years working on additions and revisions to a new edition of the book and preparing his final volume of poems and prose, Good-Bye, My Fancy (David McKay, 1891). After his death on March 26, 1892, Whitman was buried in a tomb he designed and had built on a lot in Harleigh Cemeter
see more at: http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/126
Artists/ writers he influenced:
Bram Stoker
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