Birth and Early Career
•Born 31 May 1819 near Huntington, Long Island, New York •Second child (of 8) born to Walter and Louisa Van Velsor Whitman. •Works as printer’s apprentice (to 1835) and as a schoolteacher.
Parents were Deists but with a Quaker background.  Whtiman’s father had long been a follower of Thomas Paine
Radical  Quakerism of Elizas Hicks--anti-institutional, placing much emphasis on the inner light.
Emanuel Swedenborg.
Although the family moved to Brooklyn when Whitman was 4 and he lived there and in New York and Washington for much of his life, he often drew on Long Island and its seashore--calling the island Paumonok, the Native American name for the place--in poems such as “Out of the Cradle, Endlessly Rocking.”