About the Author Walt Whitman (1819-1892) was born on Long Island and educated in Brooklyn, New York. He served as a printer's devil, journeyman compositor, itinerant schoolteacher, editor, and unofficial nurse to Northern and Southern soldiers and is widely considered the greatest American poet of the nineteenth century. Justin Kaplan, volume editor, is a writer whose works include Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain, which won a Pulitzer Prize in biography and a National Book Award. His Walt Whitman: A Life won the 1981 American Book Award for Biography.