Now the Drum of War: Walt Whitman and His Brothers in the Civil War »

Robert Roper has won awards for his fiction and nonfiction alike. His previous book, Fatal Mountaineer, won the 2002 Boardman-Tasker Prize given by London’s Royal Geographical Society. His journalism appears in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Outside, Men’s Journal, National Geographic, and other publications. He teaches at Johns Hopkins and lives in Baltimore and California.

The Civil War is seen anew, and a great American family is brought to life, in Robert Roper’s brilliant evocation of the family Whitman.

Walt Whitman’s work as a nurse to the wounded soldiers of the Civil War had a profound effect on the way he saw the world. Much less well known is the extraordinary record of his younger brother George Washington Whitman, who led his men in twenty-one major battles almost to die in a Confederate prison camp as the fighting ended. Drawing on the searing letters that Walt, George, their mother Louisa, and their other brothers wrote to each other during the conflict, Now the Drum of War chronicles the experience of an archetypal American family enduring its own long crisis alongside the anguish of the nation. Robert Roper has constructed a powerful narrative about America’s greatest crucible, and a compelling, braided story of our most original poet and one of our bravest soldiers.

The Washington Post - Nicholas Delbanco

Biographies of Whitman are numerous, and the bookshelf of critical assessments continues to expand. It isn't evident, therefore, that another book is needed, but Robert Roper's Now the Drum of War does strive for something new. His subtitle is "Walt Whitman and his Brothers in the Civil War," and he offers up a fresh perspective: the bard as family man…Via letters and notebook entries, Now the Drum of War fills in important blanks; we end up with a sense of the individual as part of an impressive collective entity called Whitman.

George Whitman, early in the war 3

Walt Whitman, 1863 IO

Walter Whitman Sr. 20

Catharine Market, Brooklyn, 1850 22

Walt Whitman, young newsman 32

Walt Whitman, 1848 56

The Myrtle Street house 59

Walt Whitman, 1854 64

Mrs. Whitman 72

Brooklyn Water Works Pumping Engine # 1 87

Jeff Whitman 96

Louisa May Alcott 101

Walt Whitman, around 1865 103

Washington, D.C., in the Civil War 106

Clara Barton 127

General Edward Ferrero 139

Burying soldiers, Fredericksburg, 1864 150

William O'Connor 155

Hospital tents in Washington, D.C. 162

Ralph Waldo Emerson 169

Walt Whitman, early 1860s 171

John Burroughs 180

Abraham Lincoln 195

Walt Whitman's letter to Tom Sawyer 208

Ward K, Armory Square Hospital 111

George Whitman, later in the war 236

Sanitary Commission workers, 1863 250

William Hammond 252

General Robert B. Potter 261

Burnside's Bridge 264

Dead soldiers at Antietam 265

Sam Pooley 267

Colonel Charles W. LeGendre 270

Dead soldier at Spotsylvania 292

Captain Samuel Sims 300

Frank Butler 306

Drawing of Danville prison camp 310

Walt Whitman's letter for George's leave extension 340

Abraham Lincoln's funeral procession 341

Walt Whitman and Pete Doyle 349

Walt Whitman, early 1870s 360

Walt Whitman and Bill Duckett 378