Events
Walt Whitman
is bornHis family
moves to
BrooklynBegins job as
Printing apprentice for
the Brooklyn Patriot.Whitman
leaves schoolThe Whitman family moves back to
Long Island, leaving fourteen-year-old
Walt by himselfWhitman's newspaper trade is
destroyed by fire. He rejoins his parents
and siblings in Long Island and gets a job
as a schoolteacher.Whitman temporarily leaves teaching
to take over the editorship of The
Long Islander newspaper. After ten
months he sells the paper and returns to teaching.Whitman moves back to New York City. He
works in newspapers as both a typesetter
and as a freelance writerWhitman publishes his first novel, Franklin
Evans; or The Inebriate.Whitman starts a job as the editor of
the Brooklyn Daily Eagle newspaper.
His articles there include reviews of early novelsWhitman is forced out of his job at the
Brooklyn Daily Eagle after a political dispute
with his boss over Whitman's opposition to slavery.Back in New York, Whitman found an
antislavery newspaper called the
Weekly Freeman. The paper's offices are
burned after the first issue is published.Whitman publishes the first edition of Leaves
of Grass, a collection of twelve poems written
in a bold new style.Whitman's father dies.The second edition of Leaves of Grass
is published, now with 32 poems. He also
reprints Emerson's congratulatory letter
without permission, angering the elder poet.Writer Henry David Thoreau and
educator Bronson Alcott travel from
Concord, Massachusetts to visit Whitman.Whitman spends two years as the editor
for the Brooklyn Daily Times.The Civil War breaks out. Whitman moves
to Washington D.C. and works as a nurse
in the military hospitals.President Abraham Lincoln is assassinated
at Ford's Theater less than a week after
the Confederate surrender. Whitman, now a
clerk at the U.S. Department of the
Interior, composes the poems "When Lilacs
Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" and "O
Captain! My Captain!" in honor of the fallen president.Whitman's boss at the Department of the
Interior fires him because of the
supposedly obscene content of Leaves of
Grass, which Whitman works on during
his downtime at the office.Whitman and his friend William D.
O'Connor publish The Good Gray Poet,
a defense of Whitman in the wake of his
firing from the Interior.Whitman publishes the fifth edition of
Leaves of Grass.Whitman suffers his first stroke, which
leaves him partially paralyzed. It is the first
of several serious health problems that
Whitman endures in the last twenty years of his life.Four months after his stroke, Whitman's
mother Louisa dies. Walt moves in with
his brother George in Camden, New Jersey.Thanks to his earnings from Leaves of
Grass, Whitman buys a house on
Camden's Mickle Street.Whitman suffers another stroke that
causes paralysis. His health is in severe
decline, and he redrafts his willWhitman prepares the final edition of
Leaves of Grass, known as the "Deathbed Edition."Walt Whitman dies at home in Camden at
the age of 72.
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