...cestry with the placid slowness, selfesteem, stubbornness, and mysticism of better Dutch (and Quaker) ancestry, Walt Whitman was born 31 May, 1819, at the hamlet of West Hills, a few miles south of Huntington , Long Island. His father, Walter Whitman, was a farmer and later a somewhat nomadic carpenter and moderately successful housebuilder, who, although, like the poet's excellent mother, he had even le...