Walt Whitman in Washington, D.C.

“An energetic study of the famed writer’s time in the nation’s capital and the loves of his life” ( Washington Independent Review of Books ). Walt Whitman was already famous for Leaves of Grass when he journeyed to Washington at the height of the Civil War to find his brother George, a Union officer wounded at the Battle of Fredericksburg. Eventually, Whitman would serve as a volunteer “hospital missionary”—making more than six hundred hospital visits and serving over eighty thousand sick and wo