Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born in Portland, Maine in 1807. After studying at Bowdoin College and spending time in Europe, he became a professor at Bowdoin and later at Harvard. He released his first poetry collections, Voices of the Night and Ballads and Other Poems, in 1839 and 1841 respectively. In 1854, he retired from teaching to focus on writing, living the rest of his life in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Longfellow was known for his epic poems, such as Evangeline, and was the most popular American poet of the day. After his wife Frances died in 1861, Longfellow had difficulty writing poetry and focused on his translation work, which included Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. He died in 1882.