Two biographies of Whitman have been secondary sources of immeasurable worth to us. We refer to Walt Whitman an American, by Henry Seidel Canby (1943), which is “A study in biography”, and The Solitary Singer, by Gay Wilson Allen (1955), “A critical biography of Walt Whitman.” Canby’s style is more essayistic and personal, as the subtitle of his book indicates. In this sense, he has more room to speculate and suggest explanation for events and changes in Whitman’s life and career. As we all know, Whitman left as little account as possible of his personal life, so that anyone investigating his life needs to have a lot of imagination and creativity to look for plausible interpretation of his acts. On the other hand, even taking into consideration Whitman’s evasiveness, Allen’s work is more factual, providing the reader with practically a year by year description of what happened in Whitman’s life and works. It does not lack personal opinion on his part; however, it is always less interpretive and more concrete in his utterances. We have profited a lot from both works; and both are worth reading. As the reader will notice, our work contains numerous passages from both books. This is why we do not write a longer description of them here.
