Walt Whitman Speaks Lib/E: His Final Thoughts on Life, Writing, Spirituality, and the Promise of America

For the Whitman bicentennial, a delightful keepsake edition of the incomparable wisdom of America's greatest poet, distilled from his fascinating late-in-life conversations with Horace Traubel Toward the end of his life, Walt Whitman was visited almost daily at his home in Camden, New Jersey, by the young poet and social reformer Horace Traubel. After each visit, Traubel meticulously recorded their conversation, transcribing with such sensitivity that Whitman's friend John Burroughs remarked that he felt he could almost hear the poet breathing. In Walt Whitman Speaks, acclaimed author Brenda Wineapple draws from Traubel's extensive interviews an extraordinary gathering of Whitman's observations that conveys the core of his ethos and vision. Here is Whitman the sage, champion of expansiveness and human freedom. Here, too, is the poet's more personal side--his vivid memories of Thoreau, Emerson, and Lincoln, his literary judgments on writers such as Shakespeare, Goethe, and Tolstoy, and his expressions of hope in the democratic promise of the nation he loved. The result is a keepsake edition to touch the soul, capturing the distilled wisdom of America's greatest poet.

About the Author :
Walt Whitman (1819-1892) was the son of a carpenter. His formal schooling ended at age eleven, when he was apprenticed to a printer in Brooklyn. He spent the next two decades as a printer, freelance writer, and editor in New York. In 1855, at his own expense, he published the first edition of Leaves of Grass, which would mark him as the major poetic voice of an emerging America. Whitman would go on expanding and revising it for the rest of his life, with the final edition appearing in 1892, the year of his death. Horace Traubel (1858-1919) is best known as the author of a nine-volume biography of Whitman's final four years, Walt Whitman in Camden. He visited the poet virtually daily from the mid-1880s until Whitman's death in 1892. Brenda Wineapple is the author of Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877 (named a best book of 2013 by the New York Times, Kirkus, and Bookpage); White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson (a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award, a winner of the Washington Arts Club National Award for arts writing, and named a best book of 2008 by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Christian Science Monitor, The Economist, and more); and Hawthorne: A Life (named a best book of 2003 by the San Francisco Chronicle, Newsday, and more). The recipient of a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2014, Wineapple was elected a Fellow of the American Society of American Historians in 2014 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012. She's also won a Guggenheim fellowship, a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, and two National Endowment Fellowships in the Humanities. She regularly contributes to such major publications as the New York Times Book Review, the Wall Street Journal, The Nation, and the American Scholar. Henry Strozier is an actor with a forty-year career in numerous movies and television series. Also a voice-over artist, he has worked extensively in video games and audiobook narration, earning several AudioFile Earphones Awards. Jayme Mattler is a professional voiceover artist with years of experience in recording, directing, and producing. Passionate about narrating audiobooks, she has been the recipient of multiple Audie Award nominations.

Review :
"A treasure of Walt unvarnished, reflective, and still firing on all cylinders into his seventies...Endlessly quotable and perfect for dipping into and savoring." -- "The Guardian" "Brenda Wineapple's pithy volume, in its bare-bones efficiency, allows us to appreciate...the best of Whitman's off-the-cuff remarks." -- "Wall Street Journal"