FROST, Robert Lee
Born: March 26, 1874, in San Francisco, California, United States
Died: January 29, 1963, in Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Robert Frost was an American poet. Although he was rejected by publishers early in his career, he eventually established himself as a respected writer. Many of his works were dramatic monologues with themes of an individual's attempts to operate in his world. During his lifetime, he farmed, made shoes, taught school, and edited a
country paper.
His father was William Prescott Frost Jr. Born in New England, his father worked in the schools as a teacher and headmaster. After his marriage, he moved to San Francisco and worked as a journalist. His mother was Isabella Moodie, a Scottish-born school teacher.
The family returned to New England when Frost was ten. His father had died of tuberculosis, and Isabella taught school to support Robert and his sister. Much of Frost's poetry describes the New England farms of his youth. Frost's mother, as the primary caretaker, encouraged Frost in his writing.
Frost was athletic, excelling in baseball and football. It was with the direction of his mother that he graduated from high school as co- valedictorian. The position was shared with his future wife, Elinor Miriam White.
After high school, Frost attended Dartmouth College as his grandfather wanted him to become a lawyer. However, Frost left school after one year and started working as a journalist and writer. His early poems were rejected by several publications. He married Elinor in 1895 and the couple ran a one room schoolhouse with Frost's mother.
The next decade was an unhappy one for Frost. He returned to school and attempted to become a farmer, but both ventures were unsuccessful. His son, daughter and mother passed away and he became very depressed, almost suicidal. During this time, however, he took many long walks and developed an interest in botany. During this time that he wrote some of his best poetry, but still, he was rejected by publishers.
In 1912, he moved his family to England where a publisher finally accepted his work: A Boy's Will in 1913, then North of Boston the following year. These volumes contain After Apple-Picking, and Mending Wall. In England, he associated with many of the Georgian poets and formed a close friendship with Edward Thomas.
With a secure reputation, he returned to the United States in 1915 and settled on a farm in New Hampshire. For the next ten years, he supplemented his writing by teaching and holding positions of poet-in-residence at Amherst College and the University of Michigan. Publications included Mountain Interval in 1916, which included Birches and
The Road Not Taken.
Frost received much recognition from this point forward, and received four Pulitzer Prizes between 1928 and 1942. His wife died in 1939. He was a prolific writer, producing works through to 1962, when In the Clearing was published. During his lifetime, he was put in the category of Wordsworth and Emerson. Today, he is still one of the most popular contemporary poets.
JOYCE, James Augustine Aloysius
Born: February 2, 1882, in Dublin, Ireland
Died: January 13, 1941, in Zurich, Switzerland
James Joyce, the oldest of fifteen children in his family, was born to Mary Jane Murray and civil servant John Stanislaus Joyce in 1882. The family was poor and Joyce was educated at Jesuit schools, such as the University College in Dublin. At University College Joyce contributed literary essays to the college magazine. While there he also broke with the church after being raised as a Roman Catholic.
He and Nora Barnacle (a former chambermaid whom he eventually married) left Dublin in 1904. They lived in Trieste, in Paris and in Zurich, along with their two children Giorgio and Lucia. They were barely supported by gifts from patrons, and Joyce's income as a language instructor. Beginning in 1907, Joyce suffered severe eye problems leading to near blindness. Over the years he endured ten serious operations, but they did not stop him from producing some of the most influential literature of the first half of the twentieth century. His first book, Chamber Music, published in 1907, was a collection of love poems. In 1914 he published his second work, a collection of short stories entitled Dubliners. Other early works include the largely autobiographical A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and the play Exiles, published in 1916 and 1918 respectively.
It was the 1922 publication of his next work, Ulysses, however, which brought Joyce international fame. In this text based on the themes of Homer's Odyssey, Joyce further developed his characteristic use of symbols and 'stream of consciousness' writing which he had used in his earlier book Portrait. This technique, which involved 'recording' all the thoughts and feelings of a character, was a significant development for realist fiction and character portrayal. The book follows a day in the life of two characters who eventually meet. Ulysses received a widely varied and at times
violent reception; while some felt the book depicted a rather squalid existence in Dublin, others felt the book explored fundamental human feelings and experiences.
Joyce continued writing and published two more collections of verse ( Pomes Penyeach and Collected Poems ) before his last and most complex work, Finnegan's Wake, was published in 1939. He furthered his experimentation with language in this book, attempting to represent in fiction a cyclical theory of history. Joyce died in 1941 in Zurich, where after living in Paris for twenty years, he had moved when Germans invaded France during World War II.