Walt Whitman Books In Order

Franklin Evans, or The Inebriate: A Tale of the Times

Not many people know that Walt Whitman arguably the preeminent American poet of the nineteenth century began his literary career as a novelist. Franklin Evans, or The Inebriate: A Tale of the Times was his first and only novel. Published in 1842, during a period of widespread temperance activity, it became Whitman’s most popular work during his lifetime, selling some twenty thousand copies.

The novel tells the rags to riches story of Franklin Evans, an innocent young man from the Long Island countryside who seeks his fortune in New York City. Corrupted by music halls, theaters, and above all taverns, he gradually becomes a drunkard. Until the very end of the tale, Evans s efforts to abstain fail, and each time he resumes drinking, another series of misadventures ensues. Along the way, Evans encounters a world of mores and conventions rapidly changing in response to the vicissitudes of slavery, investment capital, urban mass culture, and fervent reform. Although Evans finally signs a temperance pledge, his sobriety remains haunted by the often contradictory and unsettling changes in antebellum American culture.

The editors substantial introduction situates Franklin Evans in relation to Whitman s life and career, mid nineteenth century American print culture, and many of the developments and institutions the novel depicts, including urbanization, immigration, slavery, the temperance movement, and new understandings of class, race, gender, and sexuality. This edition includes a short temperance story Whitman published at about the same time as he did Franklin Evans, the surviving fragment of what appears to be another unfinished temperance novel by Whitman, and a temperance speech Abraham Lincoln gave the same year that Franklin Evans was published.

Song of Myself

One of Walt Whitman’s most loved and greatest poems, ‘Song of Myself‘ is an optimistic and inspirational look at the world. Originally published as part of ‘Leaves of Grass’ in 1855, ‘Song of Myself‘ is as accessible and important today as when it was first written. Read ‘Song of Myself‘ and enjoy a true poetic masterpiece.

Drum Taps

The brigade of Virginia and Maryland have march’d forth to intercept the enemy, They are cut off, murderous artillery from the hills plays upon them, Rank after rank falls, while over them silently droops the flag, Baptized that day in many a young man’s bloody wounds, In death, defeat, and sisters’, mothers’ tears.

When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer

Walt Whitman’s ‘When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer‘ is an enduring celebration of the imagination. Here, Whitman’s wise words are beautifully recast by New York Times 1 best selling illustrator Loren Long to tell the story of a boy’s fascination with the heavens. Toy rocket in hand, the boy finds himself in a crowded, stuffy lecture hall. At first he is amazed by the charts and the figures. But when he finds himself overwhelmed by the pontifications of an academic, he retreats to the great outdoors and does something as universal as the stars themselves…

he dreams.

Democratic Vistas: The Original Edition in Facsimile

Written in the aftermath of the American Civil War during the ferment of national Reconstruction, Walt Whitman’s Democratic Vistas remains one of the most penetrating analyses of democracy ever written. Diagnosing democracy s failures as well as laying out its vast possibilities, Whitman offers an unflinching as*sessment of the ongoing social experiment known as the United States. Now available for the first time in a facsimile of the original 1870 1871 edition, with an introduction and annotations by noted Whitman scholar Ed Folsom that illuminate the essay s historical and cultural contexts, this searing analysis of American culture offers readers today the opportunity to argue with Whitman over the nature of democracy and the future of the nation. Living in Washington, D.C., where Congress granted male African Americans the right to vote nearly five years before the fifteenth amendment extended that right across the nation, and working for the office charged with enforcing the new civil rights amendments to the Constitution, Whitman was at the volatile center of his nation s massive attempt to reconstruct and redefine itself after the tumultuous years of civil war. In the enduring cultural document that Democratic Vistas has become, the great poet of democracy analyzes the role that literature plays in the development of a culture, the inevitable tensions between the democratic individual and the democratic nationality, and the corrosive effects of materialism on the democratic spirit. His own conflicting racial biases notwithstanding, Whitman in Democratic Vistas offers his most eloquent and extended articulation of the beckoning American democratic future. At a time when the nation has elected a president whom Whitman could never have imagined, his controversial and provocative book is a timely reminder of those occasions when we experience the expansion of America s democratic dream.

Democratic Vistas and Other Papers

Walt Whitman 1819 1892 contributed to the greatest prose of American letters with Democratic Vistas, now considered a classic discussion of the theory of democracy and its possibilities. In this essay he protests the unrestrained materialism, greed, corruption and spiritual failure of what, two years later, Mark Twain would label ‘The Gilded Age.’ Whitman criticizes America for its ‘mighty, many threaded wealth and industry’ that mask an underlying ‘dry and flat Sahara’ of soul. He calls for a new kind of literature to revive the American population: ‘Not the book needs so much to be the complete thing, but the reader of the book does.’ Whitman was one of the few writers to keep the Emersonian faith in individual and cultural regeneration after the Civil War.

Civil War Poetry and Prose

A superb selection of poems, letters and prose from the war years. ‘O Captain! My Captain!,’ ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,’ ‘Adieu to a Soldier,’ many other letters and prose works.

November Boughs

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

An American Primer: With Facsimiles of the Original Manuscript

notes for a never completed linguistic project

The Gathering of the Forces

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www. million books. com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CIVIC INTERESTS July 9, 1846 fort Greene Park, Brooklyn The New York Tribune of this morning prints the following paragraph: A correspondent writes us a very enthusiastic remonstrance against the projected leveling of Fort Greene. We entirely agree with him in the feeling which such desecration inspires; but we fear that the case is a hopeless one. Trade and commerce are an irresistible power, and before their necessities nothing can stand. The requirements of the rapidly flourishing city for ‘more room’ are constant and clamorous; and her citizens are justly proud of the rapid growth, even while lamenting that in her progress a spot so haunted with lofty associations must be despoiled. Who wrote that? It evidently speaks the sentiments of any body else in the world than either of the regular writers for the Tribune. What a sneaking way this, on the part of some one, to ‘whip the devil round the stump!’ We know there are a few small eyed folk in Brooklyn, who oppose Washington Park, fromjealous or pecuniary motives; but even them we should hardly think guilty of such a subterranean bit of spite as is involved in the way of that paragraph. Tribune writers! all the New York press! we appeal to you, have you ever been on Fort Greene, just at sundown of a pleasant day? and invoke your assistance in this matter. ‘More room,’ we want, do we? Wei Well if we are crowded for room, having a stretch of some hundred and twenty miles to grow out upon, at our leisure, what must your New York be? If the ‘necessities of trade and commerce,’ are so vital in such cases that ‘nothing can stand’ before them, why keep your Park, an open space yet? Build it up! cut down the trees on your Battery, and cover their old roots with five story buildings. ‘Must be despoiled,’ quotha! W…

I Hear America Singing

Walt Whitman 1819 92 is the authentic voice of democratic America. After a childhood in Brooklyn, he spent many years in and around Manhattan and Washington, where he witnessed troops returning from the Civil War and tended wounded soldiers in the camp hospitals. Whitman’s broad humanity, his love of cities especially Manhattan, his sympathy with all conditions of people, and his visionary even prophetic sense of the reality of the American dream make him as much a poet for our time as he was for the time of the American Civil War and its aftermath. This selection of courageous and consoling poems focuses on Whitman’s vision of democracy, his love of Manhattan, his sense of the future and of the community of peoples of this earth.

Memoranda during the War

In December of 1862, having read his brother’s name in a casualty list, Walt Whitman rushed from Brooklyn to the war front, where he found his brother wounded but recovering. But Whitman also found there a ‘new world,’ a world dense with horror and revelation.
Memoranda during the War is Whitman’s testament to the anguish, heroism, and terror of the Civil War. The book consists of journal entries extending from Whitman’s arrival on the front in 1862 through to the war’s conclusion in 1865. Whitman details his encounters with soldiers and doctors, meditates on particular battles and on the meanings of the war for the nation, and recounts his wordless though peculiarly intimate public exchanges with President Lincoln, a man Whitman saw often on the streets of Washington and by whom he was deeply fascinated. The book offers an astounding amalgam of death portraits, anecdotes of battle, last words, messages to distant loved ones, and remarkably restrained and muted descriptions of pain, dismemberment, and dying all of it, however grim, suffused with Whitman’s undiminished enthusiasm and affection for these young soldiers. And throughout, we find Whitman laboring with heroic determination to sustain and nourish his once ardent faith in America and American life, even as the nation unleashed unprecedented violence upon itself.
Edited and introduced by Peter Coviello, the book also includes Whitman’s famous speech ‘The Death of Abraham Lincoln,’ selected poems, and a letter to the parents of a deceased soldier. Memoranda during the War is a powerful portrait of a nation at war written by one of our greatest poets.

Collect

Strange as it may seem, the topmost proof of a race is its own born poetry. The presence of that, or the absence, each tells its story. As the flowering rose or lily, as the ripen’d fruit to a tree, the apple or the peach, no matter how fine the trunk, or copious or rich the branches and foliage, here waits sine qua non at last. The stamp of entire and finish’d greatness to any nation, to the American Republic among the rest, must be sternly withheld till it has put what it stands for in the blossom of original, first class poems. No imitations will do.

The Mystic Poets

Discover How Whitman’s Spiritual Life and Vision Can Enlighten Your Own Walt Whitman was the most innovative and influential poet of the nineteenth century. The self proclaimed ‘American Bard,’ Whitman challenged his contemporaries to resist conforming to society and shocked them with his embrace of the sensual. But beneath his manifesto for social revolution lies a vigorous call for spiritual revolution as well. This beautiful sampling of Whitman s most important poetry from Leaves of Grass, and selections from his prose writings, offers a glimpse into the spiritual side of his most radical themes love for country, love for others, and love of Self. Whitman seeks to tear down the belief that the spiritual resides only in the religious and embraces the idea that nothing is more divine than humankind, nothing greater than the individual soul. Rich with passion, reverence, and wonder, this unique collection offers insight into Whitman s quest for self discovery, which involved an ongoing mystical experience of the world. Though seemingly personal, his verse speaks to universal harmony and universal love, optimism and joy, and celebrates the outwardly mundane details of life through words electrified with love and spirit. Whitman s collected poems and prose are not an object or icon to be gazed upon or revered but a transparency we look through to see ourselves with greater clarity, excitement, and meaning. They wake us up to our potential, to learning about and from ourselves . To experience his writing is to experience ourselves more deeply . from the Preface by Gary David Comstock

Leaves of Grass and Other Writings

This revised Norton Critical Edition contains the most complete and authoritative collection of Whitman’s work available in a paperback student edition. The text of Leaves of Grass is again that of the indispensable ‘Reader’s Comprehensive Edition,’ edited by Sculley Bradley and Harold W. Blodgett, which is accompanied by revised and expanded explanatory annotations. New to this edition is the full text of the celebrated 1855 first edition of Leaves of Grass, as well as generous excerpts from Whitman’s two prose masterpieces, Democratic Vistas and Specimen Days. Following the texts is an album of portraits of Whitman, as well as ‘Whitman on His Art,’ a collection of Whitman’s statements about his role as a poet taken from his notebooks, letters, conversations, and newspaper articles. While continuing to provide leading commentary on Whitman by major twentieth century poets and critics, among them D. H. Lawrence, William Carlos Williams, and Randall Jarrell, this revised edition adds important commentary by Whitman contemporaries Henry David Thoreau, Fanny Fern, Henry James, and Oscar Wilde, among others. An entirely new section of recent criticism includes six essays by David S. Reynolds, Karen Sanchez Eppler, John Irwin, Allen Grossman, Betsy Erkkila, and Michael Moon that reflect both the continuing historicist mainstream of Whitman literary interpretation and influential recent work in gender and sexuality studies. The volume also includes a Chronology, a Selected Bibliography, and an Index of Titles.

Selected Poems 1855-1892

A century after his death, Whitman is still celebrated as America’s greatest poet. In this startling new edition of his work, Whitman biographer Gary Schmidgall presents over two hundred poems in their original pristine form, in the chronological order in which they were written, with Whitman’s original line breaks and punctuation. Included in this volume are facsimilies of Whitman’s original manuscripts, contemporary and generally blistering reviews of Whitman’s poetry not surprisingly Henry James hated it, and early pre Leaves of Grass poems that return us to the physical Whitman, rejoicing sometimes graphically in homoerotic love. Unlike the many other available editions, all drawn from the final authorized or ‘deathbed’ Leaves of Grass, this collection focuses on the exuberant poems Whitman wrote during the creative and sexual prime of his life, roughly between 1853 and 1860. These poems are faithfully presented as Whitman first gave them to the world fearless, explicit, and uncompromised before he transformed himself into America’s respectable, mainstream Good Gray Poet through thirty years of revision, self censorship, and suppression. Whitman admitted that his later poetry lacked the ‘ecstasy of statement’ of his early verse. Revealing that ecstasy for the first time, this edition makes possible a major reappraisal of our nation’s first great poet.

Poetry and Prose

Contains the first and ‘deathbed’ editions of ‘Leaves of Grass,’ and virtually all of Whitman’s prose, with reminiscences of nineteenth century New York City, notes on the Civil War, especially his service in Washington hospitals and glimpses of President Lincoln, and attacks on the misuses of national wealth after the war.

Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts: Volume I: Family Notes and Autobiography, Brooklyn and New York

General Series Editors: Gay Wilson Allen and Sculley BradleyOriginally published between 1961 and 1984, and now available in paperback for the first time, the critically acclaimed Collected Writings of Walt Whitman captures every facet of one of America’s most important poets. Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts gathers Whitman s autobiographical notes, his views on contemporary politics, and the writings he made as he educated himself in ancient history, religion and mythology, health including phrenology, and word study. Included is material on his Civil War experiences, his love of Abraham Lincoln, his descriptions of various trips to the West and South and of the cities in which he resided, his generally pessimistic view of America s prospects in the Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, and his reminiscences during his final years and his preoccupation with the increasing ailments that came with old age. Many of these notes served as sources for his poetry first drafts of some of the poems are included as they appear in the notes and as the basis for his lectures.

Whitman: Poems

The Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets hardcover series is popular for its compact size and reasonable price which does not compromise content. Poems: Whitman contains forty two of the American master’s poems, including ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,’ ‘Song of Myself,’ ‘I Hear America Singing,’ ‘Halcyon Days,’ and an index of first lines.

Memories of President Lincoln

This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger Publishing’s Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the world’s literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard to find books with something of interest for everyone!

The Walt Whitman Reader

This handsome, unabridged edition of the great literary masterpiece makes this superb and original collection of poems available to everyone.

Earth, My Likeness: Nature Poetry of Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman was a wild soul. His poetry expresses an earthy sensuality that was out of sync with the expanding industrialization all around him. His love of wild nature and the sensual experiences of life are felt in his every poem. This carefully selected collection, alongside the beauty of Roderick MacIver’s watercolor art, creates a grand tribute to this sensitive soul.

Prose and Poetry of the American West

Prose and Poetry of the American West is an extraordinarily comprehensive collection of short stories, poems, and essays about the American West that represents the extensive contributions of all its people: men, women, natives, and immigrants. The more than fifty authors included are listed according to their birth dates; and their production, spanning four and a half centuries, is divided into four periods. Work defines each period and shows how selected authors exemplify it. Among those representing the Emergence Period 1540 1832 of explorers and pioneers entering the American West and a new state of consciousness are Pedro de Casta eda, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, Jedediah Smith, and Walt Whitman. The Mythopoeic Period 1833 1889 is represented by, among others, Helen Hunt Jackson, Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Andy Adams, Owen Wister, Black Elk, Luther Standing Bear, Stephen Crane, Willa Cather, and John C. Neihardt. In the Neo mythic Period 1890 1914, such authors as Thomas Hornsby Ferril, Man Sandoz, Frank Waters, Dorothy Johnson, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, Wallace Stegner, Wright Morris, and William Stafford begin revising the old myths of the American West. Finally, in the Neo western Period 1914 to the present Edward Abbey, Gary Snyder, James Welch, Jimmy Santiago Baca, and others demonstrate how the land west of the ninety eighth meridian has shaped the creative consciousness. This admirable anthology, filling a need long felt by readers, shows writers singing about the American West, the land of dreams; then recording great deeds in it; and finally turning to examine their thoughts about it.