would first get to know the American painter Thomas Eakins, who both painted and photographed the poet in his final years.
In 1884, Whitman moved less than a mile away to his own home on Mickle Street in Camden, where he would live until his death eight years later. Although bedridden for most of his time on Mickle Street, he continued to revise Leaves of Grass until the end (publishing the last edition of his lifetime in 1889 and working on another even on his deathbed) and to receive visitors, including Eakins; Horace Traubel, author of the nine-volume Boswellian biography Walt Whitman in Camden); and Sadakichi Hartmann, author of the lesser-known, much shorter biographical recollection Conversations with Whitman, which are touchingly dedicated to “Artist Thomas Eakins, of Philadelphia, as an Admirer of Walt Whitman, in his own Native Independence, Simplicity and Force, without Crankiness and Subserviency.”
