PENGUIN CLASSIC

LEAVES OF GRASS

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) was born on Long Island and educated in Brooklyn, New York. He served as a printer’s devil, journeyman compositor, and itinerant schoolteacher, edited the Long Islander , and in 1846 became editor of The Brooklyn Eagle , a position from which he was discharged for political reasons. After a period in New Orleans, considered seminal in shaping his philosophy, he returned to Brooklyn. Although he had earlier affected the mien of a dandy, he now dressed as a “rough,” and became prominent among the bohemian element of New York. In 1855 he published Leaves of Grass , which he continued to revise and republish over his lifetime. The Civil War found him working as an unofficial nurse to Northern and Southern soldiers in army hospitals in Washington, D.C. After the war he became a clerk in the Indian Bureau of the Department of the Interior, from which he was shortly dismissed by the Secretary on the grounds that Leaves of Grass was an immoral book. During his last nineteen years he lived in Camden, New Jersey. Although not previously neglected, he was particularly in the public eye during these years, when such English writers as William Rossetti, Swinburne, J. A. Symonds, and Robert Stevenson contended that Americans did not fully appreciate him. Among his works are Drum-Taps (1865), Democratic Vistas and Passage to India (1871), and Specimen Days (1882).

Longtime literary editor of The New Republic , Malcolm Cowley (1898–1989) served as president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters in the ’50s and ’60s, and was chancellor of the American Academy of Arts and Letters from 1966 to 1976. The author of numerous works of criticism, essays, and poetry, Cowley’s books include Exile’s Return, A Second Flowering , and The Literary Situation.