To Walt Whitman, America
By Kenneth M. Price
192 pp., 6 x 9, 18 illus., notes, index
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Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8078-5518-8
Published: March 2004 -
E-book EPUB ISBN: 978-0-8078-7611-4
Published: October 2005 -
E-book PDF ISBN: 979-8-8908-7842-7
Published: October 2005
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Price examines Whitman's own writings as well as those of writers who were influenced by him, paying particular attention to Whitman's legacies for an ethnically and sexually diverse America. He focuses on fictional works by Edith Wharton, D. H. Lawrence, John Dos Passos, Ishmael Reed, and Gloria Naylor, among others. In Price's study, Leaves of Grass emerges as a living document accruing meanings that evolve with time and with new readers, with Whitman and his words regularly pulled into debates over immigration, politics, sexuality, and national identity. As Price demonstrates, Whitman is a recurring starting point, a provocation, and an irresistible, rewritable text for those who reinvent the icon in their efforts to remake America itself.
About the Author
Kenneth M. Price is Hillegass Professor of American Literature at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He is author of Whitman and Tradition: The Poet in His Century and coeditor of The Walt Whitman Archive,
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Reviews
"Price offers interesting insights. . . . His dissection of Gloria Naylor's Linden Hills ought to have the good effect of making that work better known and better understood."--Journal of American Studies
"[Price] presents a brief but eloquent study of the presence of Whitman in American culture from the second half of the 19th century to the present. . . . Highly recommended."--Choice
“Brilliantly illuminating.”--American Literature
"In To Walt Whitman, America, Kenneth Price has illuminated why and how Whitman has been such a vital force in American culture writ large--in our novels and murals and, most revealingly, our movies. Price offers a grand sweeping panorama of America's response to Whitman, from Ben Shahn to Marilyn Monroe, from D. W. Griffith to Jim Jarmusch, from Edith Wharton to Ishmael Reed. It's a dizzying and revelatory ride through the past century, and along the way we learn a great deal about how Whitman keeps forcing Americans to face the ways that evolving notions about race and sexuality and gender and class continue to alter the very definition of democracy. It's a book about America waking up to Whitman."--Ed Folsom, University of Iowa
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