Walt Whitman's America : a cultural biography /
David S. Reynolds.
- 1st ed.
- New York : Knopf, 1995.
- xii, 671 p. ; 25 cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 594-638) and index.
"Underneath all, nativity": literary genealogy, literary geography -- A Brooklyn boyhood: sights, surroundings, influences -- Dark passages: teaching and early authorship -- Mannahatta: the literary marketplace and urban reality -- "The United States need poets": the political and social crisis -- American performances: theater, oratory, music -- "Sex is the root of it all": eroticism and gender -- Earth, body, soul: science and religion -- Toward a popular aesthetic: the visual arts -- "I contain multitudes": the first edition of Leaves of Grass. "The murderous delays": in search of an audience -- Brotherly love, national war: into the 1860s -- "My book and the war are one": the Washington years -- Reconstructing a nation, reconstructing a poet: postbellum institutions -- The burden of atlas: the new America -- The pope of Mickle Street: the final years.
Exploring the full range of writings by and about Whitman - not just his most famous work but also his earliest poems and stories, his conversations, letters, journals, newspaper writings, and daybooks - Reynolds gives us a full, rounded picture of the man, of his creative blending of disparate ideas and images, and his contradictory stances on race, class, and gender. Whitman's uniqueness is shown to spring