Introduction -- The Mickle Street Ménage -- Serendipity: Visitors and Vignettes -- Walt on Walt -- Walt on the Whitman Family -- Walt on Images of Himself -- Memories of Long Island, Brooklyn,and Manhattan -- Credos -- Walt on the Literary Life -- Before "Leaves of Grass" -- About "Leaves of Grass" -- Individual Poems and Sequences -- Printing "Leaves of Grass" -- "Leaves of Grass" and the Critics -- Advice -- Expurgation -- Waning Powers -- Avowal Letters -- Walt and His Inner Circle -- A Flaminger Soul: William Douglas O'Connor -- Magnificent Potencies: Robert Green Ingersoll -- Walt and His Boys -- Walt's "Big Secret" -- Views of America -- Affection, Love, and Sex -- The Woman Sex -- Memories of Washington and the Secession War -- Turned to a Generous Key: Abraham Lincoln -- Race -- Famous Authors -- Walt and the Bard -- Sweet Magnetic Man: Ralph Waldo Emerson -- Oxygenated Men and Women: Walt's Pantheon -- Scoundrel Time -- Ecclesiastic -- Music, Opera, and Marietta -- Bottoms Up -- Walt's Way with Words -- Peeves -- Pleasures -- Walt on Various and Sundry -- "A Frightful Gone-ness" -The Physical Decline -- "A Voice from Death" -The Last Months -- "The Last Mile Driven" -The End -- "The Touch of Peace" -Mortuary -- The Burial House at Harleigh Cemetery -- The Last Hurrah: May 1919 -- Citations -- Bibliographical Note -- Index.