Robert Frost was born in San Francisco in 1874. When he was ten, his father died and he and his mother moved to New England. He attended school at Dartmouth and Harvard, worked in a mill, taught, and took up farming, before he moved to England, where his first books of poetry,
A Boy's Will (1913) and
North of Boston (1914), were published. In 1915 he returned to the United States and settled on a farm in New Hampshire. Four volumes of his poetry,
New Hampshire (1923),
Collected Poems (1930),
A Further Range (1936), and
A Witness Tree (1942) were awarded Pulitzer Prizes. He died in 1963.
Jay Parini, the D. E. Axinn Professor of English and Creative Writing at Middlebury College, is a poet, novelist, biographer, and critic. He is the author of
Robert Frost: A Life,
Why Poetry Matters, and
Borges and Me: An Encounter, among many other works of nonfiction. His books of poetry include
New and Collected Poems, 1975-2015 and
The Art of Subtraction.