WALT WHITMAN AND THE CULTURE OF AMERICAN CELEBRITY

Yale University Press, 2006. 1st Edition 1st Printing. Hardcover. As New/As New. 3-4 B&W era photos. CONDITION: What makes this book and DJ "as new"? I believe, but cannot prove it, that this book has been very very gently pre-read( or parts were). Yale Univ. Press hardcover (tan boards) & dust jacket (in mylar cover), first edition, first printing. 3-4 B&W era photos only. No major problems. CONTENT: What is the relationship between poetry and fame? What happens to a reader's experience when a poem invokes its author's popularity? Is there a meaningful connection between poetry and advertising, between the rhetoric of lyric and the rhetoric of hype? One of the first full-scale treatments of celebrity in nineteenth-century America, this book examines Walt Whitman's lifelong interest in fame and publicity. 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.