Specimen Days (Illustrated)

Though it is one of its author's lesser-known works, Specimen Days is perhaps the closest thing to an autobiography that Walt Whitman ever wrote. The book defies any notion of genre, and is a hodgepodge of accounts about Whitman's youth, his experiences in the American Civil War, and his musings on nature and his everyday life in Camden, New Jersey. Whitman describes it as “the most wayward, spontaneous, fragmentary book ever printed,” written in the style he’s come to be known for: long, meandering, melodious sentences. The merits of this book do not only lie in its literary value, but also in Whitman’s balancing of the personal and the historical to narrate the inimitable life of that period, embodied in the struggle of the self.