Walt Whitman (1819–1892) from Song of Myself LINKS The Walt Whitman Hypertext Archive http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/whitman/ On the first page of this site maintained at the University of Virginia, it states: "Through the various portals, the user can reach digitized images of original documents, transcriptions of those documents, and an elaborate body of introductions, commentaries, and other materials useful in interpreting Whitman's works." BIOGRAPHY Walt Whitman (1819–1892) One of nine children, Whitman was born in Huntington, Long Island, in New York, and grew up in Brooklyn, where his father worked as a carpenter. At age eleven, after five years of public school, Whitman took a job as a printer's assistant. He learned the printing trade and, before his twentieth birthday, became editor of the Long Islander, a Huntington newspaper. He edited several newspapers in the New York area and one in New Orleans before leaving the newspaper business in 1848. He then lived with his parents, worked as a part-time carpenter, and began writing Leaves of Grass, which he first published at his own expense in 1855. After the Civil War (during which he was a devoted volunteer, ministering to the wounded), Whitman was fired from his job in the Department of the Interior by Secretary James Harlan, who considered Leaves of Grass obscene. Soon, however, he was rehired in the attorney general's office, where he remained until 1874. In 1881, after many editions, Leaves of Grass finally found a publisher willing to print it uncensored. Translations were enthusiastically received in Europe, but Whitman remained relatively unappreciated in America, where it was only after his death that a large audience would come to admire his original and innovative expression of American individualism.