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DID NOT FINISH. At the age of 50 I suddenly find myself with a strong random interest in Walt Whitman and his magnum opus Leaves of Grass for the first time in my life; so as I make my way through it this winter and spring, I thought I'd also pick up a good biography of Whitman to hopefully help me put the book in the proper perspective. Unfortunately, although this one by Justin Kaplan was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize when first coming out in 1980, it is thoroughly in the tradition of biographies from the Mid-Century Modernist era -- that is, stuffily academic, written with unnecessary purplish prose, with an emphasis on the kind of minutiae that will turn off the general reader, and with a Postmodernist framework that's been structured oddly just for the sake of being structured oddly. (The first 50 pages starts with Whitman's elderly years and death, Kaplan wrongly assuming that readers already know the encyclopedic facts about his life and works, while the next 50 pages after that are dedicated to an ickily Freudian interpretation of Whitman's childhood, at which point I stopped reading.)

I think instead I'm going to do what I should've done in the first place, which is to start with Whitman's exhaustive Wikipedia page and related entries on his works; then I think I'll swap out Kaplan's book at the library for David Reynolds' 1996 Walt Whitman's America, a look at the cultural norms of the late 19th-century US that shaped and influenced Whitman and his poetry. I'd also love to hear your own recommendations for good books about Whitman, which you can leave in the comments here with my thanks!