Walt Whitman Archive

The Walt Whitman Archive is an electronic research and teaching tool that sets out to make Whitman's vast work, for the first time, easily and conveniently accessible to scholars, students, and general readers. Whitman, America's most influential poet and one of the four or five most innovative and significant writers in United States history, is the most challenging of all American authors in terms of the textual difficulties his work presents. He left behind an enormous amount of written material, and his major life work, Leaves of Grass, went through six very different editions, each of which was issued in a number of formats, creating a book that is probably best studied as numerous distinct creations rather than as a single revised work. His many notebooks, manuscript fragments, prose essays, letters, and voluminous journalistic articles all offer key cultural and biographical contexts for his poetry. The Whitman Archive sets out to incorporate as much of this material as possible, drawing on the resources of libraries and collections from around the United States and around the world. The Whitman Archive is directed by Kenneth M. Price (University of Nebraska–Lincoln) and Ed Folsom (University of Iowa).

Digital versions of all six editions of Leaves of Grass are accessible on the Whitman Archive. Also available is an extended biography of Whitman, written by Ed Folsom and Kenneth M. Price. All known contemporary reviews of Whitman's work are currently available, as are all known photographs of Whitman, complete with annotations. Introductions to each edition of Leaves and other entries from Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, edited by J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings, are available through an agreement with Garland Publishing Company. And, in conjunction with the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, we offer an up-to-date bibliography of books, essays, notes, and reviews about Whitman; this is the only comprehensive current bibliography of work about Whitman.

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