Biography of Robert Frost

Robert Lee Frost was born in San Francisco on March 26, 1874 and died in Boston on Jan. 29, 1963.he was one of America's leading 20th-century poets and a four-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize. He was a pastoral poet often associated with rural New England. His verse forms are traditional - he often said that he would as soon play tennis without a net as write free verse. 

After his father's death in 1885, when young Frost was 11, the family left California and settled in Massachusetts. Frost attended high school in that state, entered Dartmouth College, but remained less than one semester. Returning to Massachusetts, he taught school and worked in a mill and as a newspaper reporter. In 1894 he sold "My Butterfly: An Elegy" to The Independent, a New York literary journal. A year later he married Eleanor White. From 1897 to 1899 he attended Harvard College as a special student but left without a degree. Over the next ten years he wrote (but rarely published) poems, operated a farm in Derry, New Hampshire (purchased for him by his paternal grandfather), and supplemented his income by teaching at Derry's Pinkerton Academy. In 1912, at the age of 38, he sold the farm and used the proceeds to take his family to England, where he could devote himself entirely to writing. His efforts to establish himself and his work were almost immediately successful. A Boy's Will was accepted by a London publisher and brought out in 1913, followed a year later by North of Boston. Favorable reviews on both sides of the Atlantic resulted in American publication of the books by Henry Holt and Company, Frost's primary American publisher, and in the establishing of Frost's transatlantic reputation. He unquestionably succeeded in realizing his life's ambition: to write "a few poems it will be hard to get rid of."