At the age of twelve, Walter was already contributing to the newspapers. Whitman's first signed article was in The New York Mirror in 1834, were he compares the present metropolitan city, as it was in the past, evergreen. .
In 1833, his family moved, leaving Walt Whitman alone in the big city as a child, because he was only fourteen years old. There, he learned how to set type under Patriot's foreman printer William Hartshorne. He gained skills and experiencing an independence that would mark his whole career. By the time he was sixteen, Walter was a journeyman printer and compositor in New York City. As he turned 17, he decided to have a career change.
Whitman's next career was that of a teacher. This career was a type of scape, because he didn't want to become a farmer and also because he had a lot of economic problems. The five years he taught were full of deceptions, because of the bad earnings and the classes he gave was to students of different ages in the same room. But for him this was not an obstacle to teach. He encouraged students to think aloud rather than simply recite, he refused to punish by paddling, involving the students in educational games and joining his students in baseball and card games. Later he would write the poem "There was a Child Went Forth" where he express his philosophy of teaching.
In 1838, he interrupted his teaching and started his own newspaper called The Long Islander, he had the help from his brother George. Despite of his efforts to edit, publish, write and deliver the new paper, it failed within a year so he decided to return to the classroom. It lasted two years more, so in 1841 he quit his job. Someone came with the rumor that he committed sodomy with a student.
Still, Whitman decided to become a Fiction writer. He worked in about twenty different newspapers and magazines printing fiction and early poetry. His best years in this stage were between 1840 and 1845 when he placed his stories in prestigious magazines like the American Review and Democratic Review.
