Volume 28, Number 5 · April 2, 1981
All-American Bard
By Irvin Ehrenpreis
Walt Whitman: A Life
by Justin Kaplan
Simon and Schuster, 429 pp., $15.00
It was Walt Whitman, at the age of forty-five, who finally took his elder brother Jesse to a lunatic asylum in Brooklyn and left him there. As Justin Kaplan reports in his brisk and accurate biography of Whitman, Jesse had an unstable, violent nature, and Walt early became their mother's favorite child. Even when she was dying, Mrs. Whitman singled out her 'dear beloved Walter' by name for a particular leave-taking.
Review, 4542 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |