Leaves of Grass.

WHITMAN, Walt.

Item Number: 95221

Philadelphia: David McKay, 1900.

Finely bound edition of one of the most important volume of American poetry. Octavo, bound in full green morocco, marbled endpapers, gilt titles and tooling to the spine, engraved frontispiece portrait of Whitman, facsimile folding autobiographical manuscript. In near fine condition.

Scottish American publisher David McKay founded his own publishing house in Philadelphia in September of 1882 and at the age of 25 published the first collected set of Shakespeare’s works in the United States. McKay’s notoriety as a publisher began at Rees Welsh & Co., where he published Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass after James R. Osgood & Co., had refused due to threatened legal action by the attorney-general of Massachusetts for its “alleged immorality.” "Always the champion of the common man, Whitman is both the poet and the prophet of democracy… In a sense, it is America's second Declaration of Independence: that of 1776 was political, this of 1855 intellectual" (PMM, 340). The most influential volume of poetry written in America, Whitman's masterpiece, Leaves of Grass is "one of the most magnificent fabrications of modern times… he never surrendered… his vision of himself as one who might go forth among the American people and astonish them…" (DAB).