[4][5] When he was a boy, his family spent two years living in Nanjing, China, where his physics professor father, Walter, had a guest professorship.

[7] After graduation, Whitman struck out on what he called his "hobo adventures", train-hopping, hitchhiking, and walking on foot through the U.S., Mexico, and Central America.

While in Massachusetts during his military service, Whitman also managed to open his first bookstore, the Taunton Book Lounge, "modeled on the great Paris salons", as he wrote to a friend.

[8] With his own collection of one thousand books, and having come into a small inheritance, Whitman bought an Arab grocery in Paris and transformed it into a bookstore in 1951 at 37 rue de la Bûcherie on the Left Bank.

It was first called Le Mistral, but was later renamed (in 1964) Shakespeare and Company, after Sylvia Beach's earlier Paris bookstore of the same name (1919 to 1941).

[5][6] Whitman's shop opened just two years before his friend Lawrence Ferlinghetti co-founded City Lights in San Francisco.

[6] On Sunday mornings, he would traditionally cook his guests a pancake breakfast, brewing up a thin ersatz "syrup" out of some burnt sugar and water.

[5][10] Whitman was the subject of a documentary titled Portrait of a Bookstore as an Old Man by Gonzague Pichelin and Benjamin Sutherland broadcast on the Sundance Channel in fall 2005.