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Walt Whitman
Biography
Walt Whitman was born May 31, 1819 into a working class family in West Hills, New York. Walt is one of 8 eight children. Walt Whitman Sr. and Louisa Van Velsor, were his parents. Walt Whitman was born into the growing U.S. and was one of the first generations to be born in the new land.
Walt Sr. was a trained carpenter but had trouble finding work so he eventually took up farming. Walt Jr. had 2 sisters, Hanna Whitman and Mary Whitman, and 5 brothers, Jesse Whitman, Andrew Jackson Whitman, George Washington Whitman, Thomas Jefferson Whitman, and Edward Whitman. Hanna ended up marrying an abusive husband, Jesse became violent and mentally unstable, Andrew Jackson became an Alcoholic and married a prostitute before he died in 1863. The family farm had at one time been rather large, but had diminished greatly in size over the years. Eventually, Walt Whitman Sr. moved his family to Brooklyn where a population boom was occurring. Walt Sr. tried real estates and buying into homes, but he was unorganized so he never got anywhere.
As a child, Walt loved Brooklyn. He loved when they lived near the East River because of the ferries that he would remember throughout his life. Another boy hood activity that he would remember throughout his life will be his visits to his grandparent’s house that was in Long Island. Walter enjoyed watching the waves come up and meet with the sand and he later wrote a poem about this experience. While in Brooklyn, Walter when to public schools for 6 years where he learned with a variety of ages in the same schoolroom. (All except for the African Americans who were taught in a class on the top floor. The only part of schooling that Walter did not particularly car for in school was the corporal punishment. Walter would attack corporal punishment later in his life with his poems. However, most of Whitman’s knowledge did not come from school but from the trips to the library where he would teach himself.
Walter Jr. had his first job at the age of 11. He was an office boy for a Brooklyn Lawyer who gave him a subscription to a Library where he began to teach himself. At the age of 12, he became an apprentice on the Long Island Patriot, which was a working-class newspaper. From this experience he learned the printing trade and was overly excited about seeing his own words published in the newspaper. In the year of 1833, his family returned to West Hills, New York. Whitman Jr. stayed because of his love for Brooklyn.
During the summer of 1833, Thomas Jefferson Whitman was born. Thomas was the only sibling that Walt Whitman Jr. ever got close to. During Jeff’s early life, Walter played little attention to him, but when Jeff reached the age of 14, the two [next page]