Robert Frost

Robert Frost was an American poet. He was born on March 26, 1874 in San Francisco, California, to journalist William Prescott Frost, Jr. and Isabelle Moodie. His father was a teacher and an editor of the San Francisco Evening Bulletin. After William Frost died, the family moved to Lawrence, Massachusetts. Frost graduated from Lawrence High School in 1892, and sold his first poem in 1894 to New York Independent for $15 ($410 today). He married Elinor White on December 19, 1895.

Frost and his wife received a farm as a gift from his grandfather, and they lived there for 9 years. Frost worked on the farm and wrote early in the mornings, producing many of the poems for which he would later become famous. Ultimately, though, he was unsuccessful at farming and became an English teacher at New Hampshire's Pinkerton Academy, and later at the New Hampshire Normal School.

In 1912 Frost sailed with his family to Great Britain. His first book of poetry was published there a year later, and a second came a year after that. He returned to American in 1915, at the beginning of World War I, and bought a farm in New Hampshire, where he began to write and teach. 

In 1924, he won the first of four Pulitzer prizes for the book New Hampshire: A Poem with Notes and Grace Notes. He would go on to win three more prizes.

In 1940 he bought a 5-acre plot in South Miami, Florida; he spent his winters there for the rest of his life. Though he never graduated from college, he received over 40 honorary degrees in his lifetime, from universities including Harvard, Princeton, Oxford, and Camebridge. He is the only person to receive two honorary degrees from Dartmouth College.

Frost was awarded a United States Congressional Medal "In recognition of his poetry, which has enriched the culture of the United States and the philosophy of the world," which was bestowed by President Kennedy in 1962. He died only a year later, on January 29, 1963, of complications from prostrate surgery. He is buried at the Old Bennington Cemetery in Bennington, Vermont.