Life and works of Walt Whitman

2.2 Life and works of Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman was born on May 31, 1819, in the village of West Hills on Long Island, New York, approximately 50 miles east of New York City. He was the second of eight children. Whitman’s father was of English descent, and his mother was Dutch. In later life, he would refer to his ancestors as having been early settlers of Long Island.
In 1822, when Walt was 2 years old, the Whitman family moved to Brooklyn, which was still a small town. Whitman would spend most of the next 40 years of his life in Brooklyn, which grew into a thriving city during that time.
After finishing public school in Brooklyn, Whitman began working at the age of 11. He was an office boy for a law office before becoming an apprentice printer at a newspaper. In his late teens, Whitman worked for several years as a schoolteacher in rural Long Island. In 1838, he founded a weekly newspaper on Long Island. He reported and wrote stories, printed the paper, and even delivered it on horseback. By the early 1840s, he had broken into professional journalism, writing articles for magazines and newspapers in New York.

Early Writings

Early writing efforts by Whitman were fairly conventional. He wrote about popular trends and contributed sketches about city life. In 1842, he wrote the temperance novel "Franklin Evans," which depicted the horrors of alcoholism. In later life, Whitman would denounce the novel as “rot,” but at the time it was a commercial success.
In the mid-1840s, Whitman became the editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, but his political views, which were aligned with the upstart Free Soil Party, eventually got him fired. He then took a job working at a newspaper in New Orleans. While he seemed to enjoy the exotic nature of the city, he was apparently homesick for Brooklyn. The job only lasted a few months.
By the early 1850s he was still writing for newspapers, but his focus had turned to poetry. He often jotted down notes for poems inspired by the busy city life around him.