Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography

Name: Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography
Author: David S. Reynolds
ISBN: 9780307761927

David S. Reynolds

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Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography

David S. Reynolds

award won

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Walt Whitman's America won the Bancroft Prize and the Ambassador Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. In his poetry Walt Whitman set out to encompass all of America and in so doing heal its deepening divisions. This magisterial biography demonstrates the epic scale of his achievement, as well as the dreams and anxieties that impelled it, for it places the poet securely within the political and cultural context of his age. Combing through the full range of Whitman's writing, David Reynolds shows how Whitman gathered inspiration from every stratum of nineteenth-century American life: the convulsions of slavery and depression; the raffish dandyism of the Bowery "b'hoys"; the exuberant rhetoric of actors, orators, and divines. We see how Whitman reconciled his own sexuality with contemporary social mores and how his energetic courtship of the public presaged the vogues of advertising and celebrity.

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