Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” was banned from libraries across the United States. The backlash against the poetry book even cost Whitman his federal government job.
his boss found a copy of “Leaves of Grass” in his desk and was so outraged by sexually suggestive passages in the book that he fired the poet.
In January 1865, Whitman landed a job as a “second class” clerk at the Interior Department’s Bureau of Indian Affairs office in the big Patent Office Building. His pay was $1,200 a year, equal to about $22,000 now. “Our eccentric fellow citizen Walt Whitman has lost his position in the Interior Department at Washington under the general order discharging immoral persons,” the Brooklyn Eagle reported. The paper added that Whitman quickly got a clerk job in the attorney general’s office, “where we suppose they are not so particular about morals.”
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