Walt Whitman and the Culture of American Celebrity
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David Haven Blake
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Format: PaperPrice: $29.00
e-book
Making use of notebooks, photographs, and archival sources, David Haven Blake provides a groundbreaking history of the rise of celebrity culture in the United States. He sees Leaves of Grass alongside the birth of commercial advertising and the nation's growing obsession with the lives of the famous and the renowned. As authors, lecturers, politicians, entertainers, and clergymen vied for popularity, Whitman developed a form of poetry that routinely promoted and, indeed, celebrated itself. Walt Whitman and the Culture of American Celebrity proposes a fundamentally new way of thinking about a seminal American poet and a major national icon.
“This rich and engaging book locates Walt Whitman in an expanse of popular culture that stretches from patent medicines to presidential politics, revealing the poet's complicated, often inconsistent views on poetry, commerce, and celebrity.”—Wes Davis, Yale University
"This is an elegantly written and original book that has much to teach us about Whitman's life and work and the culture of celebrity in which he lived and wrote."—Betsy Erkkila, author of Whitman the Political Poet
“Using rich archival material, David Blake shows us a Whitman 'celebrating' American democracy and dreaming of the mass applause that alone proves a poet's worth.”—Wai Chee Dimock, Yale University
“This tightly written volume examines the trajectory of poet Walt Whitman’s relationship to his dynamic 19th-century American society. . . . In this learned and highly detailed little volume from Blake, we now have a clear discussion of how the dynamics of the new American society helped shape the poetics and ideas of its greatest poet. Highly recommended for all academic libraries.”—Library Journal
"Smart without being dense, clever without being smarmy, this cultural history is an engaging, at times eye-opening read. . . . This enlightening study elevates all involved, especially the dubious legacy of that perennial beast, the American Idol."—Publishers Weekly
Publication Date: May 5, 2015
8 b/w illus.
