Walt Whitman's America : a cultural biography /
David S. Reynolds.
- 1st Vintage books ed
- New York : Vintage Books, 1996.
- xii, 671 pages : illustrations ; 21 cm.
Originally published: New York : Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1995.
"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.
A study of the life and works of one of America's finest poets is set against the social, cultural, and political backdrop of his time, offering new insights into his poetry, ideas, and imagery.
Winner of Ambassador Book Award 1996 Winner of Bancroft Prize. Nominated for National Book Critics Circle Awards.