American poet Helen Hunt Jackson was born in 1830 and is most well-known for her tireless activism on the part of the indigenous Native American population. Brought up in Massachusetts by Unitarian parents, she was orphaned at an early age and sent to live with her aunt. She was educated initially at Ipswich Seminary and then went on to board ...
Born in 1797, George Moses Horton was a slave poet who was brought up in the Southern United States and was the first black American to have his work published in the region. He took his surname from plantation owner William Horton, growing up on an estate in North Carolina and then a tobacco farm in Chatham County. His education ...
Bhartrihari was a writer who lived through the second half of the fifth century. He wrote in the sacred Hindu language called Sanskrit and is believed to have produced at least two important pieces of work which became extremely influential. One was the definitive guide to Sanskrit grammar which portrayed a holistic view of the language spoken at that time. The second ...
If ever there were an American poet that could be immortalised by the writing of a single poem then Clement Clarke Moore was such a man. He will not have known it at the time that he wrote A Visit from St Nicholas purely to amuse his own children but this poem, when published in a New York newspaper just before the ...
Born around 1516 into an aristocratic family, Henry Howard helped to found a renaissance in English poetry. Distantly related to one of the wives of Henry VIII, Catherine Howard, he was brought up in Windsor along with Henry Fitzroy with whom he had a long and enduring friendship. As a young man he grew up to be an ...
Edith Wharton rose from her American middle-class, socialite origins to become a famous writer and the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Age of Innocence which was published in 1921. This story was later dramatized on film, the latest version being the Academy award-winning production in 1993 starring Daniel Day Lewis and Michelle Pfeiffer. Another story, The ...
Born in 1772 towards the back end of the Le Dynasty in Vietnam, Ho Xuan Huong is considered one of the country’s greatest poets. Brought up at a time of turmoil and conflict, little is known about her life but her work earned her the title of The Queen of Nom Poetry. Considered one of the cultural icons of Vietnam, ...
Edith Nesbit was an English writer who used the shortened “E. Nesbit” on her book covers. She was an active socialist who transferred her political ideals into her stories that were, on the whole, for children. She did this by moving away from children’s story telling methods used by the likes of Lewis Carroll and Kenneth Grahame. These authors created alternative, ...
From a family of rich New England bankers, Harry Crosby was born in 1898 in Boston, a poet who came to epitomize what Ernest Hemingway described as the Lost Generation. He was brought up in the exclusivity of the Back Bay area of the city and his uncle was then one of the richest men in America. He lived a ...
Born in Oregon in 1852, poet Edwin Markham preached love and social reform in his verses, often in stark contrast to some of his more pessimistic contemporaries. Although he was a late comer to poetry success, not publishing his first works until his late thirties, Markham became one of the most popular and widely read literary figures of the twentieth century, ...
