Whitman and the Civil War: America's Poet During the Lost Years of 1860-1862 Chronicles in great detail Walt Whitman's life during the first years of the Civil War, a period that had previously been overlooked by scholars and biographers. Provides information about Whitman's time at Pfaff's bar, including the identity of the mysterious woman Ellen Eyre, who was not a woman at all but a cross-dressing male con artist named William Kinney.