This book analyses Whitman's integrated life, writings, and government work in his urban context to reevaluate the writer and the nation's capital in a time of transformation.

Kenneth M. Price, Hillegass University Professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, has co-directed The Walt Whitman Archive since 1995. He is a founding co-director of the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at Nebraska. His previous books include Whitman and Tradition: The Poet in His Century (Yale, 1990); To Walt Whitman, America (North Carolina, 2004) and, with co-author Ed Folsom, Re-Scripting Walt Whitman (Blackwell, 2005). He has served as President of both the Society for Textual Scholarship and the Association for Documentary Editing.

• Preface


• 1: Whitman, Washington, and the Convulsiveness of Civil War


• 2: Whitman as a Paradoxical 'Missionary to the Wounded'


• 3: Strayed Cattle: Anti-Pastoralism in Whitman's War Writings


• 4: Social Calamity, Personal Perturbations, and Office Decorum: How Leaves of Grass Grew Pensive


• 5: Multi-racial Democracy and Black Democratic Vistas


• Works Cited