Walt Whitman, one of the most famous American poets in the canon, was born in 1819. When he was 12, he started training to be a printer, which prompted him to read the works of Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare. When he was 17, he taught in a one-room schoolhouse in Long Island. He taught for five years before founding the weekly newspaper, the Long-Islander. In 1848, he took a job at the New Orleans Crescent but returned north later that year and founded a “free soil” paper, the Brooklyn Freeman. In 1855, Whitman published the opus that he would spend his life revising, Leaves of Grass. He sent a copy to Ralph Waldo Emerson--the second edition of the book featured a letter of praise from the famed poet and philosopher.

During the Civil War, Whitman worked in hospitals tending to the wounded. He worked as a clerk for the Department of the Interior but was subsequently fired when the Secretary of the Interior found out he authored the controversial Leaves of Grass. Whitman spent his last years in Camden, New Jersey working on a new edition of the book and writing his final publication, Good-Bye, My Fancy. He died in 1892 and is buried in a tomb he designed in Camden’s Harleigh Cemetery.

A Clear Midnight

This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,

Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson

done,

Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the

themes thou lovest best,

Night, sleep, death and the stars.

The latest installment in local art bloggers Roberta Fallon and Libby Rosof's Look! series takes viewers on a tour of the Book of War exhibit currently on display at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Watch the video here . And don't miss your opportunity to see the exhibit in person before it closes on December 9.

Writers and musicians are inspired by one another in an artistic feedback loop that has given us, among other things, High Fidelity and The Crane Wife . While this stimulating interconnectivity may have always been intuitively clear to interested parties, now the blogosphere brings you musical playlists from celebrated authors and recommended reading lists from accomplished musicians . (Largehearted Boy features both actually.) Pay special attention to Daniel Handler's playlist here , in which he facetiously suggests that if you want anything more than "drunken honkeytonk piano which acquires a gunshot wound, hobbles off into a manual typewriter fugue that winds up as Morrocan disco before ticking off into the sunset . . . you ought to be ashamed of yourself." And by the way, Daniel Handler (Lemony Snicket himself) will be appearing at the Central Library's Montgomery Auditorium on Tuesday, October 2, at 8:00 p.m. Click here for ticket info.

You may have encountered this story in the news already. An Associated Press-Ipsos poll based on interviews conducted earlier this month and released last week indicates that one in four Americans read no books last year --that's right, none. (You can view the entire report here .) National Book Critics Circle President John Freeman weighed in on the report--and American literacy in general--in a piece he contributed to the Guardian's book blog entitled "Land of the book-free ." The piece ends on a somewhat mystifying note when Freeman suggests that "the Gap stock copies of On the Road" as a way of promoting literacy and articulating its brand--mystifying because Freeman seems to be implying that this sort of thing isn't already happening .