Getting to New Orleans required traveling over the Cumberland Gap and down rivers, of which he later wrote. America seemed to be both his home and inspiration. In "Calamus", part of his single book, Leaves of Grass, he writes of Louisiana as a "live oak growing", thus showing the joy he felt in everything he saw . In short, Whitman lived trough the nation's heroic age, at a time when people had to be (or seemed to be) a little more than life-size to accomplish all the deeds they undertook. It was natural that Whitman, with his genius and metaphysical inclinations, should have drifted into journalism, a profession that could make some demands on his native endowments. As much as he was a traveler, he was also a man of the people. In one of his reviews, he described himself as "never on platforms amid the crowds of clergymen, or professors, or aldermen, or congressmen- rather down in the bay with pilots in their pilot boats- or off on a cruise with fishers in a fishing smack- or writing on a Broadway omnibus, side by side with the driver- or with a band of loungers over the open grounds of the country- fond of New York and Brooklyn- fond of the life of the great ferries." Whitman obviously felt a kinship with his country, and later exhibited this in his writings. He also was not a man to follow others. "Self-reliant, with haughty eyes, assuming to himself all the attributes of his country, steps Walt Whitman into literature, talking like a man unaware that there was ever hitherto such a production as a book, or such a being as a writer" . .
Whitman's major work, Leaves of Grass, was first published on the fourth of July in 1855. He was thirty-six years old, not yet a published writer, and could not find any company willing to take a chance on his unusual style. His experience in newspapers allowed him to help publish his work himself, even setting up some of the type and distributing the first edition.