Walter Whitman was born in West Hills, Long Island, N.Y., on May 31, 1819, the second of six children. When he was four years old, his family moved to Brooklyn, where he attended public school for six years before being apprenticed to a printer. Two years later he went to New York City to work in printing shops, but returned to Long Island in 1835 and taught in country schools. Between 1838-39 he edited a newspaper, the Long-Islander, at Huntington; becoming bored, he went back to New York City to work as a printer and journalist {Doren, 45}. There he enjoyed the theatre, the opera, and always an omnivorous reader. He wrote unoriginal poems and stories for popular magazines and made political speeches, for which Tammany Hall democrats rewarded him with the editorship of various short-lived newspapers. For two years he edited the influential Brooklyn Eagle , but he lost his position for supporting the Free-Soil part {Doren, 51} After a brief sojourn in New Orleans he returned the Brooklyn. While he was in New Orleans he saw the vastness of this country for the first time, and he began to set down in poetry his impressions of the nation and its people. After returning to Brooklyn this is where he tried to start a Free-Soil newspaper. After several years spent at various jobs, including building houses, he began writing a new kind of poetry and thereafter neglected business. No publisher or author's name was on the first edition of Leaves of Grass' in 1855. Whitman printed it himself, and throughout his life he continued to publish expansions of revisions of the work. He sent copies of the first edition to well-known literary men. Some condemned the book, but Ralph Waldo Emerson saw its merit. In the 1856 edition, Whitman printed Emerson's letter of praise, which called the book "the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom yet contributed to American literature.""{Doren, 58}.
