Walt Whitman | Timeline
Walt Whitman's Life
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May 31, 1819
Walt Whitman is born to Louisa and Walter Whitman in Huntington Township on Long Island, New York. He is the second of eight surviving children. His father will struggle to support the family as a farmer, a carpenter, and an unsuccessful real estate speculator.
May 27, 1823
Whitman's family moves to Brooklyn, across the East River from New York City.
1831-1836
Whitman's father takes young Walt out of school at age 11 to help support the family; he has attained more formal schooling than either of his parents. He finds work as an office boy, and then apprentices as a printer for a local newspaper. In 1833, his family moves back to Long Island. Whitman works at several newspapersin Brooklyn, Long Island and New York City.
1836-1841
Whitman teaches school on Long Island. He stops teaching from 1838-39 to publish a weekly newspaper, theLong Islander.
1841-1845
Whitman moves back to New York Cityto work as a printer. He also begins publishing fiction and poetry, as well as journalistic pieces, in newspapers and journals. In 1842 his didactic temperance novel,Franklin Evans, or the Inebriate, appears in print. He stakes out radical positions on labor issues, women's property rights, capital punishment and immigration —putting him in near constant opposition to society's prevailing sentiments. In just four years in Manhattan, Whitman works briefly at theTattler, theDaily Plebeian, theStatesman, theMirror, theDemocrat, theSunand theStar.
1845-1848
Whitman moves back to Brooklyn and writes for newspapers there.
February
Whitman and his brother Jeff travel to New Orleans. Whitman has been offered a job at the New OrleansCrescent. His stay will be brief; by May he will resign and return to Brooklyn.
1848-1849
Whitman founds and edits the BrooklynWeekly Freeman, which advocates the "free soil" positionthat new states entering the Union should declare slavery illegal.
1850-1854
Whitman runs a printing office and stationery store, and also does freelance writing and house building.
1855
Engraving of Walt Whitman, frontispiece toLeaves of Grass, 1855.Library of Congress
May 15
Brooklyn printer Andrew Rome prints the first edition of Leaves of Grass. (There is no credited author, although Whitman is named in a poem and is credited on the copyright page.) Whitman himself helps set some of the type.
July 11
Whitman's father dies.
1856
Whitman writes forLife Illustrated, and publishes a second edition ofLeaves of Grass.
1857-1859
Whitman edits the BrooklynTimes. Much of his spare time in this period is spent at Pfaff's, a restaurant in lower Manhattan favored by bohemian artists and writers.
1860
The third edition ofLeaves of Grassis published in Boston. In Massachusetts to see his new publisher, Whitman also visits with his literary hero, Ralph Waldo Emerson.
1861
The Civil War begins. Whitman's younger brother George joins the Union Army.
1862
George Whitman, in his Union army uniform, c1862.Rare Book, Manuscript, Special Collections Library, Duke University
December
Whitman travels to Fredericksburg, Virginia, after George Whitman appears on a list of wounded soldiersin the newspaper. George's injury is minor and he will continue to serve in the Army.
1863-1864
Finding he has a talent and desire to give comfort to wounded soldiers, Whitman relocates to Washington, D.C.and makes the rounds of the local military hospitals. He gets a part time job at the Army Paymaster's Office to pay for his modest rented room.
January 24, 1865
Whitman takes a job at the Department of the Interior.
March 4
"With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds. ... " Whitman watches President Abraham Lincolngive his second inaugural address.
April 14
During the performance of a comedic play at Ford's Theatre, John Wilkes Booth assassinates President Lincoln.
June 30
After his supervisor readsLeaves of Grass, Whitman is fired from his job at Interior. He finds a new job at the attorney general's office.
October
Whitman publishesDrum-Taps, a book of poems on the subject of the Civil War andSequel, containing a new poem inspired by Lincoln, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd."
Autumn
Whitman meets and begins a relationship with a trolley conductor named Peter Doyle. Doyle was in the audience at Ford's Theatre on the night of Lincoln's assassination and gives Whitman a first-hand account.
1867
Whitman publishes his fourth edition ofLeaves of Grass.
1870
After a move back to Brooklyn, Whitman publishes the fifth edition ofLeaves of Grass,Democratic Vistas, andPassage to India; all are dated 1871.
January 23, 1873
Whitman suffers a stroke, debilitating his left arm and leg. He intends to stay temporarily with his brother George in Camden, New Jersey; he occupies the rooms of his mother, who has recently died.
1875
A second stroke affects the right side of Whitman's body.
1876
On the American Centennial, a special commemorative edition ofLeaves of Grassis published, as well as the collectionTwo Rivulets.
1881
Yet another edition ofLeaves of Grassis published, this time in Boston.
1882
The district attorney in Boston threatens to prosecute Whitman's Boston publisher unless certain "obscene" sections ofLeaves of Grassare edited out. Whitman finds a publisher in Philadelphia who is willing to publish and distribute the unexpurgated book.
April 14, 1887
Whitman appears on stage in New York to give a lecture on President Lincoln. Among the celebrities in attendance are writer Mark Twain, author and future secretary of state John Hay, U.S. Army commander William Tec*mseh Shermanand sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens.
1888
November Boughsis published. The poems in this collection will later be appended to printings ofLeaves of Grass.
1889
Whitman's friends and disciples organize a seventieth-birthday dinner celebration for the poet, featuring mailed-in greetings from literary notables including Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Hamlin Garland.
1891-1892
Realizing he has just a little more time to consolidate his legacy, Whitman revises his signature work one last time by adding some "annexes" to his 1881 edition. The final version ofLeaves of Grassis also known as the "death-bed edition."
March 26,1892
Whitman dies and is buried in Harleigh Cemetery in Camden, New Jersey.
