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Whitman remains enigmatic. I think I enjoy literary biography though. The idea of balancing a life against a body of literature provides a lot of opportunity for the author to write about the subject without really making official concrete statements about the subjects life.

This biography is old and feels of its time. The treatment of Whitman's sexuality is cursory and safe, but present. The war years take up a lot of space, but honestly feel periphery to the the rest of the book. The chapters that stick out in my mind is the long foreground the initial publication of Leaves of Grass. The schoolmaster and journalist years of the 1830s and 1840s. These do a great job of describing the culture of New York city and upstate New York, but leave Whitman as more of an idea than a flesh and blood figure.

I did enjoy the chronology of the book. The opening chapters start in 1884 when Whitman moves to Mickle Street. It features Traubel and Whitman's Transatlantic admirers. This means that the books closing chapter is Whitman's summers at Timber Creek in the late 1870s and early 1880s and the composition and publication of Specimen Days, which the author very intriguingly positions as perhaps the final creative statement of Whitman's life. Recommended.