Stephanie M. Blalock is an Assistant Professor in the School of Library and Information Science at the University of Iowa. She is the Iowa project manager for the Walt Whitman Archive and serves as an editor of the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review. She is the author of “Go To Pfaff’s”: The History of a Restaurant and Lager Beer Saloon (2014). Her scholarship has appeared in the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, Technology and Culture, and several edited collections. Kevin McMullen is an Associate Research Professor of English at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and a Faculty Fellow in the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities. He is the project manager of the Walt Whitman Archive, where he has overseen several grant-funded projects to identify and edit Whitman's journalism. His research on Whitman has appeared in numerous venues, most recently the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review and The Oxford Handbook of Walt Whitman. He is the editor of Fanny Fern in The New York Ledger, a digital edition of the newspaper writings of Fanny Fern, as well as the co-editor, with his students, of The Selected Poems of Harriet Monroe (2026). Stefan Schöberlein is an Associate Professor of English and the Dr. Marc Nigliazzo Faculty Fellow of Humanities at Texas A&M University—Central Texas. He is the co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Walt Whitman (2024), the author of Writing the Brain: Material Minds and Literature, 1800–1880 (2023), and the co-author of Whitman’s Southern Sojourn: Rediscovering the Poet in New Orleans, 1848 (2025). Schöberlein serves as an editor of the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review. Jason Stacy is Distinguished Research Professor of History and Social Science Pedagogy at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. He has written and edited books on Walt Whitman, including Walt Whitman’s Multitudes: Labor Reform and Persona in Whitman’s Journalism and the First Leaves of Grass (2008), Leaves of Grass, 1860: The 150th Anniversary Facsimile Edition (2009), and Walt Whitman's Selected Journalism with Douglas Noverr (2015). For over a decade he has also served as a contributing editor to the Walt Whitman Archive. His research on Midwestern authors includes Spoon River America: Edgar Lee Masters and the Myth of the American Small Town (2021) and Heartland Utopia: William Allen White on the Ideal Midwestern Town, edited with Charles Delgadillo (2026). His co-authored textbook on US history with Matthew Ellington, Fabric of a Nation (2024), is in its second edition.

• AcknowledgementsAbbreviationsIntroduction: Whitman Beyond the Foreground1. Of the Shop. Whitman in the Newspaper Office2. Deep-Dyed Heretic. Whitman’s Democratic Dissent and Emergent Republicanism3. Our Own Reporter. Whitman on the Police Beat4. City Sweet and Clean. Whitman and the Brooklyn Water Debates5. Clipped Masculinity. Reprocessed Manhood and Jacksonian Self-Help in 'Manly Health and Training'6. Inland America. Mapping the Nation’s FutureConclusion: Walt Whitman, Poet-JournalistIndex