📍Walt Whitman House, 330 Martin Luther King Boulevard, Camden, NJ 08103, USA
1884 – 1892“I grew up on Long Island and in Brooklyn, a carpenter's son, working as an office boy, printer, teacher and journalist before I published Leaves of Grass in 1855. During the Civil War I nursed wounded soldiers in Washington's hospitals. After a stroke in 1873 I came to Camden, New Jersey, to live with my brother George, across the Delaware from Philadelphia. In 1884, at sixty-five, I bought a small two-storey frame house on Mickle Street for 1,750 dollars, the first and only home I ever owned. It was a modest place, in a busy working street near the railway, and I loved it. Mary Davis, a kind sailor's widow from nearby, came to keep house for me, bringing her cat, her dog, her birds and other creatures, and my rooms filled up with books, papers, letters and manuscripts piled on every surface. I sat by the window in my rocking chair, greeting neighbours, children and the stream of visitors who came to see me. Oscar Wilde came, and Bram Stoker, and the painter Thomas Eakins, who painted and photographed me there. In my bedroom upstairs I went on revising Leaves of Grass, as I had done all my life, and in 1891 I finished the final edition, which people call the deathbed edition. After thirty-three years, I wrote to a friend, it was at last complete. I designed my own granite tomb in Harleigh Cemetery nearby. The house on Mickle Street, now Martin Luther King Boulevard, is preserved as the Walt Whitman House, with many of my belongings, the only home I ever called my own.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today