*Includes pictures
*Includes a bibliography for further reading
Edgar Allan Poe was one of America's first native-born professional authors, but he nevertheless embodied the now-common archetype of the artist - dark, tortured, brilliant and tragic. Born into troubled conditions, Poe's life hardly improved over the years, and when it did, his happiness or triumph was always brief. His work was lauded during his lifetime, but his lifestyle never came close to matching the legacy that would swell in the decades following his death. And that untimely end, so mysterious and pathetic, was an event that only Poe or Fate could have been macabre enough to script. However, in spite of (or perhaps because of) all of his suffering, Poe remains one of the great forces in American literature, particularly during its formative years. He was a pioneer of multiple literary traditions, including the gothic, horror, dark Romanticism, detective, satire, hoax and science fiction genres. Poe is best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, and Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story.
Walt Whitman, the great American poet, is also in many ways a great American enigma, for more and less are known about him than other famous men in 19th century American history. On the one hand, he was the product of something of an all-American family, the sort of salt of the earth people he would later describe so vividly in his work. On the other, he was a complete bohemian and profligate, given to vanity in the way he dressed and lived. His seminal work, Leaves of Grass, began as little more than a pamphlet but grew for decades, as each new edition added more poems. By the time of his death, it had become a large volume still studied today. While he wrote other pieces for publication, Leaves of Grass remained his magnum opus and his baby, nurturing and developing it throughout his life. And yet, through it all, the title remained the same self-deprecating play on words that he had given it when he first self-published the work in 1855.
Like many writers of her day, Emily Dickinson was a virtual unknown during her lifetime. After her death, however, when people discovered the incredible amount of poetry that she had written, Dickinson became celebrated as one of America's greatest poets. Dickinson was notoriously introverted and mostly lived as a recluse, carrying out her friendships almost entirely by written letters. Her work was just as unique; her poetry is written with short lines, occasionally lacked titles, and often used slant rhyme and unconventional capitalization and punctuation. Only a few of her poems were published in her lifetime, but American schoolchildren across the country read her work today.
Of all the authors and poets American schoolchildren may be exposed to over the course of their education, Robert Frost is often one of the first, and on rare occasions that he is not, it is still a near certainty that some of his most famous poems will be discussed at some point. Many will have memorized "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" before finishing grade school or will instantly recall the end of "The Road Not Taken."
Frost may not be as remembered or influential as other American literary giants, or even poets such as Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, but his career was historic in terms of its length and breadth of accomplishments. Over the course of several decades, Frost became the first to win four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry, and he also earned such recognitions as a Congressional Medal of Honor before being made the poet laureate of Vermont shortly before the end of his life.