#12: Walt Whitman
Whitman’s poetry repeatedly collided with nineteenth-century morality. Leaves of Grass contained treatments of the body, desire, and same-sex affection that many authorities considered obscene. Interior Secretary James Harlan famously fired Whitman from a federal clerkship in 1865 after discovering the book. Later, Boston authorities threatened Whitman’s publisher with obscenity prosecution unless passages were removed from the 1881–82 edition. The publisher stopped distribution. Ironically, all the moral outrage generated publicity and helped sell even more copies.
