![]() Moreover, Thomas Gunn, an occasional visitor to Pfaff's, noted that Whitman had somewhat of a reputation for being miserly among the Bohemians as he was "voted mean as he never stands drinks or pays for his own if it's possible to avoid it" (vol. Reminiscing about his time at Pfaff's, artist Elihu Vedder recalls that it was, "here I saw Walt Whitman he had not become famous yet, and I then regarded many of the Boys as his superiors, as they did themselves" ( Digressions 226). This critical appraisal from the bohemian group wasn't unanimous, however. In the pages of the Saturday Press Whitman was lionized as "The New Nebuchadnezzar" of American poetry (May 26, 1860) and made the focus of more media attention than any other writer mentioned in the Press. If the literary mainstream failed to recognize Whitman's genius, the Pfaff's bohemians made up for that lack tenfold. It is during this period of Whitman's life that he began frequenting Pfaff's bar and fraternizing with bohemians such as Henry Clapp, George Arnold, and Ada Clare. When he released a second and expanded edition of Leaves of Grass the following year that similarly did not catapult him to immediate literary stardom, he withdrew from the public eye for a number of years before releasing the third edition of Leaves of Grass in 1860. While there was a flurry of attention that surrounded the initial publication of his book-including positive appraisals by such luminaries as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Charles Eliot Norton-Whitman did not achieve the immediate fame that he had hoped for. ![]() In 1855, Whitman self-published Leaves of Grass, the book of poems that defined his career as a poet he hoped that Leaves of Grass would take the literary world by storm. ![]() Before committing himself to poetry, Whitman also worked intermittently as a schoolteacher, a carpenter, and a writer of sensational prose fiction. As a young man Whitman worked as a journeyman printer for several New York newspapers, before ultimately becoming a journalist and editor in his own right. Born on Long Island and raised in Brooklyn, Walt Whitman spent his childhood and early adulthood amid the sights and sounds of New York City and its environs.
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