A Life of Walt Whitman (Barnes & Noble Digital Library)

This 1905 biography of the great American poet, written thirteen years after his death, was notable for the speculative introduction of a New Orleans romance between Whitman and a Creole woman—an affair that most biographers reject today.  Still, Binns's volume remains one of the foundational books of Whitman scholarship—a book striving to tell of Whitman the man without placing a definite value on his work.