Specimen Days

A modern-English edition of Walt Whitman’s 1882 prose reflections on America, war, cities, nature, illness, and daily life. Less famous than Leaves of Grass but often more intimate, Specimen Days is one of the richest autobiographical prose works of the nineteenth century. This edition preserves Whitman’s presence and range while making the language easier to absorb.

Specimen Days moves from Civil War hospitals to urban observation to outdoor reverie. It offers a vivid cross-section of Whitman’s mind and of the American world he inhabited.

For readers interested in Whitman, memoir, war writing, or the texture of nineteenth-century American life, it is a remarkable book.