All that made Walt Whitman's work a record of and a tribute to democratic living and the America in which he grew up, comes into this story. It is told, often in Walt's own words, so as to bring him bodily before you.

He came of seafaring folk. The opening chapter tells of a sea fight. All his life Walt had friends among pilots and sailors and he was intimate, too, with those who helped guide the Ship of State, and with bus drivers, journalists, printers and poets. Here you are made free of their company. You are taken down to the shore with him, and into the heart of the city, gay old New York, literary Boston, war-time Washington. You are in the thick of the mob at election time. You visit the camps by starlight and the crowded war-hospitals by gaslight. You travel south to picturesque New Orleans and westward across the prairies of the Sierras that were the law of Walt's poetry.

You take part with him in the free-soil struggle and in the fight for honest speech and honest thinking that made bitter enemies for the author of Leaves of Grass. You see the young man radiant with Emerson's praise of his book. You see him thrown out of his job for having published that book, and later, ill, poverty-stricken, forsaken, hobbling through the streets to peddle it. You see him in the fullness of his years, triumphing over grief and pain and neglect, a serene old giant.

This is more than a biography of a poet. It is the history of a period, of the changing world Walt knew and his response to it. Both the man and his times have something to say to everyone who would understand his America—yesterday and today. The book should have an audience among those young enough in body or in spirit to discover in Walt a challenger and a comrade.

From the dust jacket