Walt Whitman: An American

viii, 381 pp. With illustrations. "Rubicund and tumultuously bearded, egotistical, pulicity-mad, idolized by his friends, slandered or ignored by his contemporaries, Walt Whitman, the man who put sex back on to the printed page, was the problem child of American literature. But he was also the prophet and seer of democracy; a poet who made articulate the American dream and the American faith, and who created a new literary style to express himself and his country in poetry. ...And so this new biography is focused on Walt Whitman's inner life, on the mysterious, creative processes of poetry, and on the rambunctious America that was just then coming of age."