During his life, Walt Whitman carried around a number of notebooks in which he jotted down his thoughts and feelings. It is estimated that during his life, Whitman created around 100 of these notebooks, and many of them are now in public repositories. This particular collection from the American Memory Project at the Library of Congress affords visitors access to four of these celebrated notebooks. These four notebooks have a rather interesting story, largely due to the fact that they disappeared from the Library in 1942 and were returned only in 1995. For some background material, visitors may want to begin by reading one of the essays about the re-appearance of these works and their subsequent digitization. Visitors might then want to browse through the collection, which includes the first trial lines of what would become “Leaves of Grass” or his 1862 “Hospital” notebook.