Whitman published prose works his entire career. Among his best early writings was the series of newspaper essays called “The Sun-Down Papers” of 1838, and one of his final additions to Leaves of Grass was the prose essay included in “Good-Bye My Fancy,” the second annex to the 1891 “Death-Bed Edition.” If Whitman's half-century of prose writings survived without his poetry, however, we would remember him as a very minor writer, if at all. The fiction he wrote was confined to the period of his literary apprenticeship, and although some stories have caught the attention of modern biographers and critics – notably “Wild Frank's Return,” “Death in the School-Room (a Fact),” and the temperance novel Franklin Evans, all written in the 1840s, when Whitman seems seriously to have considered a profession as a fiction writer – they are distinguished less for their artistic merit than for the insight they provide into the poet's life and his relation to the literary-historical context.

The same might be said for Whitman's nonfiction prose of the period before the publication of the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855. The book reviews give insights into Whitman's reading, some of the editorial journalism contributes to the development of his political thinking, and the feature writing in newspapers and magazines anticipates the persona of “Song of Myself” and other poems – the public poet as “flaneur” or “caresser of life.”