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Robert Frost

Born March 26, 1874 Died January 29, 1963

Robert Frost was born in San Francisco and firstborn child of Isabella and William Prescott Frost, the junior Frost was named after Robert E. Lee the Confederate General

Robert Frost's father was city editor for the San Francisco Evening Post But he died of T.B. when his son was only eleven years old causing his mother to move Robert and his younger sister to live with their paternal grandparents in Lawrence, Massachusetts.

Here Frost graduates from Lawrence High School and shares Valedictorian honors with fellow student Elinor White who eventually becomes his wife.

His first published poem in 1890 'La Nocho Triste based on Prescott's Conquest of Mexico appeared in the Lawerence High School Bulletin. After graduation Frost briefly attends Dartmouth College, but leaves to work in various jobs, mill worker, newspaper reporter as well as teaching in schools.

In 1897 Frost enters Harvard College as a special student, but leaves before completing his degree requirements due to a bout of T.B. and the birth of his second child. Three years later his firstborn son Elliot dies of cholera sending his wife Elinor into a state of depression that causes marital discord. Death and mental illness continued to dog his family down through the years.

Frost tries his hand at farming but is not very successful and in 1912 unable to interest American publishers in his writing and poetry sells the farm and moves his family to England where his efforts to establish himself as a writer are at last successful

A Boys Will was accepted by a London publisher and released in 1913 followed a year later by North of Boston He received favorable reviews from both sides of the Atlantic.

Whilst in England, Frost associates himself with several other poets like Lascelles, Abercombie and Robert Brooke He became particularly close friends with the brooding Welshman named Edward Thomas whom he urged to turn his prose into poetry. Thomas eventually did, dedicating his verse to Frost before dying during WW1.

In 1915 Frost returns to America and through his literary life receives the Pulitzers Prize four times for his works of poetry as well as a gold medal in 1939 by the National Institute for Arts and Letters in New York. In 1958 along with his fellow writers and poets T.S. Elliot and Earnest Hemmingway, Robert Frost signs a letter and gets invited to the White House to help fellow writer Ezra Pound get released from a mental home where he is being held for treason. Pound is finally released when the charges are dismissed after a successful court hearing.

Robert Frost continued to write and publish poetry despite his failing health and in 1963 he was awarded the Bollinger Prize for poetry. After suffering an embolism he dies shortly after midnight on January the 29th, leaving a legacy of one of America's greatest poets.