University Libraries - Main Library Gallery

Throughout the 1840s and 1850s, Whitman wrote poetry with conventional rhyme and meter and popular fiction that ranged from moral and sentimental tales to stories focused on race, gender, sexuality, and national identity. In total, Whitman first published over twenty poems, twenty-six short stories, and two novels in New York newspapers and magazines by the early 1850s.

His temperance novel Franklin Evans (1842) was published in a special edition of The New World and sold more than 20,000 copies

“When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” Sequel to Drum-Taps. Washington, D.C., 1865-1866. [in the catalog]

Whitman’s volume of poetry Drum-Taps (1865) traces his evolving emotional responses to the Civil War, during which he volunteered as a caregiver in Washington. D.C. area hospitals. According to his own estimates in Memoranda During the War (1876), he made 600 hospital visits offering care and comfort to between 80,000 and 100,000 soldiers.

In Specimen Days (1882-83), a semi-autobiographical work, Whitman recounted his years in the hospitals, and the health problems he developed in the aftermath of the Civil War.

More about David McKay, Whitman’s final publisher, on The Walt Whitman Archive.

Now considered a foundational text in US literature, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass went through multiple significantly revised editions in his lifetime.

The first edition (1855) contains a prose preface and twelve poems, including those later titled “Song of Myself” and “I Sing The Body Electric.” In a little over a year, the contents of Whitman’s volume grew into 32 poems for the second edition (1856), and by the third edition (1860) it boasted 156 poems. These first three editions contain many of the poems today’s readers associate with Whitman’s poetic voice, such as “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” “Song of the Open Road,” “I Saw in Louisiana a Live Oak Growing,” and “A Woman Waits for Me.”

Whitman continued revising Leaves of Grass through subsequent editions, until by the “death-bed edition” of 1891-1892, the 389-poem volume is hardly recognizable from its original incarnation. Whitman’s editing impulse has spurred a debate as to which edition is “the best,” and readers now have access to various reissues of the first, third, and final editions in print, and online access to all the editions. As University of Iowa Whitman scholar Ed Folsom has suggested in Whitman Making Books/Books Making Whitman, “Whitman did not just write his book, he made his book, and he made it over and over again, each time producing a different material object that spoke to its readers in different ways.”

Whitman was a prolific writer, not only of fiction and poetry; thousands of letters and manuscripts in Whitman’s hand are in public and private collections around the world. This exhibition features an assortment of items handled by Whitman, including a manuscript on Ralph Waldo Emerson, a postal card to the naturalist John Burroughs, and a letter to Philadelphia ornithologist Thomas Gentry (pictured here).

Throughout his literary career, Whitman understood the importance of visual representations of himself in selling his books. Following this example, souvenir producers and commercial manufacturers saw value in reproducing Whitman’s name and likeness during and after his lifetime. Cigar boxes, beer bottles, an entire line of canned food, and T-shirts are just a few of the places where fans and readers have encountered the Whitman brand, ensuring that Walt Whitman remains a recognizable name and face nearly 130 years after his death.