Periodicals

Whitman contributed to a variety of newspapers and magazines in a variety of roles from the early 1830s, when he was a printer's apprentice on the Long Island Patriot, until his death in 1892. Over those sixty years, Whitman set type, owned, edited, and wrote for local newspapers, and his prose and verse appeared in national magazines and newspapers as well. During Whitman's lifetime, more readers encountered his work in periodicals than in any of the books he published. Recognizing the importance of periodicals to Whitman's career, the Archive presents page images and transcriptions of Whitman's poems that appeared for the first time in periodicals. (Prior to the Archive's work, these poems had never been systematically gathered or edited.) In addition, we present page images of the New York Aurora from the period Whitman served as editor, several months in the spring of 1842. In the future, we will add page images of the Armory Square Hospital Gazette, a hospital newspaper to which Whitman contributed during the Civil War, as well as full-text transcriptions and page images of Whitman's other Civil War journalism. The extent of Whitman's influence on and contributions to both the Aurora and Armory Square Hospital Gazette during these periods remains unclear. In making the page images of these very rare newspapers available, we hope to encourage scholarship illuminating these matters.

• Whitman's poems first published in periodicals
• Whitman's editorial work on the New York Aurora