Walt Whitman was born May 31, 1819, in West Hills, Town of Huntington, Long Island. Born to the parents of Walter and Louisa Van Velsor Whitman.

At age 11, Whitman went to formal schooling, from there he became a office boy for two lawyers and later was an apprentice and printer's devil ( mixing tubs of ink and fetching type) at the Long Island newspaper. Where he learned about the printing press and typesetting.

The following summer Whitman worked for another printer in Brooklyn (where his family had moved. His family moved back to West Hills in the spring, but Whitman remained and took a job at the a newspaper shop called the Long- Island Star. While at the Star, he became a regular patron of the local library, joined a town debating society, began attending theater performances, and anonymously published some of his earliest poetry in the New York Mirror. At age 16 in May 1835, Whitman left the Star and Brooklyn and moved to New York City to work as a compositor attempted to find further work but had difficulty in part due to a severe fire in the printing and publishing district and in part due to a general collapse in the economy leading up to the Panic of 1837. In May 1836, he rejoined his family, now living in Hempstead, Long Island.

By the summer of 1839 he found a job as a typesetter in Jamaica Queens with the a newspaper called the Long Island Democrat. He left shortly thereafter, and made another attempt at teaching, like he did in the spring of 1838, from the winter of 1840 to the spring of 1841. During this time, he published a series of ten editorials.

Whitman claimed that after years of competing for "the usual rewards," he was determined to become a poet. So in 1850, he began writing what became Leaves of Grass, a collection of poetry which he would continue editing and revising until his death. At the end of June 1855, Whitman had already printed his first edition of Leaves of Grass.

There was a total of 795 copies of Leaves of Grass that were printed. Some of the more famous poem in Leaves of Grass are " O Captain! My Captain!" and "Song of Myself."

Walt Whitman dies on March 26th, 1892.