Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography
By David S. Reynolds
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995. Hardcover, xii + 671 pages.
Among the most enlightening and engaging biographies describing the Brooklyn poet Walt Whitman is David Reynolds's Walt Whitman's America. In it, he penetrates the psychological landscape within the poet's personality and reconstructs Whitman's intellectual world. In this biography describing nineteenth-century America and the author of Leaves of Grass, Reynolds greatly enriches American intellectual history.
-DANIEL ROSS CHANDLER
March/April 1999