Walt Whitman and the American Reader

by Ezra Greenspan

In Walt Whitman and the American Reader, Greenspan casts Whitman as the central actor on the stage of nineteenth-century American literary culture--a culture redefining its democratic identity. Against the context of the major changes revolutionizing the professions of printer, publisher, bookseller, and author, he examines the connection between the bookmaking culture of mid-century and Leaves of Grass, and between the conditions for authorship and Whitman's career. The result is a far-ranging study of Whitman as a model of the nineteenth-century American writer writing for--and sometimes reacting against--the newly enfranchised, expanded reading public of his time.

282 pages, Hardcover

First published October 26, 1990

About the author

Ezra Greenspan holds the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Chair in Humanities and is professor of English at Southern Methodist University. He is the editor of William Wells Brown: A Reader and the author of William Wells Brown: An African American Life. He is a founding editor of the journal Book History.