Walt Whitman:  A Life by Justin Kaplan is a 429-page hardcover published by Simon and Schuster, New York, 1980. The dust jacket has rubbing to the cover and some small chips and tears along the edges.  Inside, the half-cloth hardcover is in pristine condition with no evidence of use.  The condition is very good.

Book Summary

Moving, penetrating, sharply focused, as revealing of an era as it is of the man and his work, this book by Justin Kaplan, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, is his finest and most ambitious work to date.

Walt Whitman's poetry established him forever as the bold voice of joy and sexual liberation, the chronicler of the century of democracy, science, progress and steam.

A poet of universal nature, the creator of a radical book and radical consciousness, Whitman spent the last years of his life crippled and poor, living in near squalor in the unlovely city of Camden, J.J.  The major work of his life, Leaves of Grass, was hailed by Emerson as "the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed"; yet it went out into a largely indifferent and sometimes hostile world--a world not read for Whitman's celebration of the human body and spirit, or for his candor, brilliance and prophetic view.

Justin Kaplan has reconstructed the life of Walt Whitman in vivid, telling detail, from his strangely shiftless youth and his years of apprenticeship on the newspapers of Brooklyn and New York and his witnessing of the pain and horror of the Civil War, to his single-minded dedication to the writing, rewriting and promotion of Leaves of Grass, not only the work of a lifetime, but the focus and center of his life itself.