Walt Whitman: A Literary Life highlights two major influences on Whitman’s poetry and life: the American Civil War and his economic condition. In addition to establishing Whitman’s attention to the Civil War through journalism and memoirs, the book takes the approach of following Whitman’s life through his poems.
Linda Wagner-Martin is Frank Borden Hanes Professor of English and Comparative Literature Emerita at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, USA. She has written and edited more than eighty books, has won a number of teaching awards, and such grants as the Guggenheim, the Senior National Endowment for the Humanities, ACLS, Ford, and Rockefeller—and been a fellow at Bellagio, Bogliasco, and the Radcliffe Institute. She was awarded the Hubbell Medal for Lifetime Service to American Literature. In the Palgrave Macmillan Literary Lives series, she has published works on Ernest Hemingway (2007), Emily Dickinson (2013), Sylvia Plath (2003), Toni Morrison (2015), and John Steinbeck (2017).