Walt Whitman

Whitman printed the first edition of "Leaves of Grass" himself in 1855, without his name on the cover, and kept rewriting and enlarging it for the rest of his life. The unrhymed long lines and the frank treatment of the body cost him a government job and won him readers everywhere else.

During the Civil War he spent three years visiting wounded soldiers in Washington hospitals. He designed his own granite tomb and paid for it while he was still alive.