Early life Robert Frost was born in
San Francisco to journalist William Prescott Frost Jr. and Isabelle Moodie. Frost's father was a teacher and later an editor of the
San Francisco Evening Bulletin (which later merged with the
San Francisco Examiner), and an unsuccessful candidate for city tax collector. After his death on May 5, 1885, the family moved across the country to
Lawrence, Massachusetts, under the patronage of Robert's grandfather William Frost Sr., who was an overseer at a New England mill. Frost graduated from
Lawrence High School in 1892, where he published his first poem in the high school magazine, served as class poet and, with his future wife Elinor White, was co-valedictorian. Frost's mother joined the
Swedenborgian church and had him baptized in it, but he left it as an adult. Although known for his later association with rural life, Frost grew up in the city. He attended
Dartmouth College for two months, long enough to be accepted into the
Theta Delta Chi fraternity. Frost returned home to teach and to work at various jobs, helping his mother teach her class of unruly boys, delivering newspapers and working in a factory maintaining
carbon arc lamps. He said that he did not enjoy these jobs, feeling that his true calling was to write poetry.
Adult years in
Derry, New Hampshire, where he wrote many of his poems, including "Tree at My Window" and "
Mending Wall" In 1894, he sold his first poem, "My Butterfly. An Elegy" (published in the November 8, 1894, edition of
The Independent of New York) for $15 ($ today). Proud of his accomplishment, he proposed marriage to Elinor Miriam White, but she demurred, wanting to finish college at
St. Lawrence University before they married. Frost then went on an excursion to the
Great Dismal Swamp in
Virginia and asked Elinor again upon his return. Having graduated, she agreed, and they were married in
Lawrence,
Massachusetts, on December 19, 1895. Frost attended
Harvard University from 1897 to 1899, but he left voluntarily due to illness. Shortly before his death, Frost's grandfather purchased
a farm for Robert and Elinor in
Derry,
New Hampshire; Frost worked the farm for nine years while writing early in the mornings and producing many of the poems that would later become famous. Ultimately his farming proved unsuccessful and he returned to the field of education as an English teacher at New Hampshire's
Pinkerton Academy from 1906 to 1911, then at the New Hampshire Normal School (now
Plymouth State University) in
Plymouth, New Hampshire. In 1912, Frost sailed with his family to
Great Britain, settling first in
Beaconsfield, a small town in
Buckinghamshire outside London. His first book of poetry, ''
A Boy's Will'', was published the next year. In England he made some important acquaintances, including
Edward Thomas (a member of the group known as the
Dymock poets and Frost's inspiration for "
The Road Not Taken"),
T. E. Hulme and
Ezra Pound. Although Pound would become the first American to write a favorable review of Frost's work, Frost later resented Pound's attempts to manipulate his American
prosody. Frost met or befriended many contemporary poets in England, especially after his first two poetry volumes were published in London in 1913 (''A Boy's Will
) and 1914 (North of Boston''). In 1915, during
World War I, Frost returned to America, where
Holt's American edition of ''A Boy's Will'' had recently been published, and bought a farm in
Franconia, New Hampshire, where he launched a career of writing, teaching and lecturing. This family homestead served as the Frosts' summer home until 1938. It is maintained today as
The Frost Place, a museum and poetry conference site. He was made an honorary member of
Phi Beta Kappa at Harvard in 1916. During the years 1917–20, 1923–25, and, on a more informal basis, 1926–1938, Frost taught English at
Amherst College in Massachusetts, notably encouraging his students to account for the myriad sounds and intonations of the spoken English language in their writing. He called his colloquial approach to language "the sound of sense". He won the first of four
Pulitzer Prizes for
New Hampshire: A Poem with Notes and Grace Notes (1923). He would win Pulitzers for
Collected Poems (1930),
A Further Range (1936) and
A Witness Tree (1942). From 1921 to 1962, Frost spent almost every summer and fall teaching at the
Bread Loaf School of English of
Middlebury College, at its mountain campus at
Ripton,
Vermont. He is credited with being a major influence upon the development of the school and its writing programs. The college now owns and maintains his former Ripton farmstead, a
National Historic Landmark, near the Bread Loaf campus. In 1921, Frost accepted a fellowship teaching post at the
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he resided until 1927, when he returned to teach at Amherst. While teaching at the University of Michigan, he was awarded a lifetime appointment at the university as a Fellow in Letters. and was given to
Bennington College in 2017. In her memoir about Frost's time in Florida,
Helen Muir writes, "Frost had called his five acres
Pencil Pines because he said he had never made a penny from anything that did not involve the use of a pencil." In the summer of 1962, he accompanied Interior Secretary
Stewart Udall on a visit to the Soviet Union in hopes of meeting
Nikita Khrushchev to lobby for peaceful relations between the two Cold War powers. In the early hours of January 29, 1963, Frost died at
Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston, at the age of 88. He was buried in the Old Bennington Cemetery in Bennington, Vermont. His
epitaph, from the last line of his poem "The Lesson for Today" (1942), is: "I had a lover's quarrel with the world."
Personal life Frost's personal life was plagued by grief and loss. In 1885, when he was 11, his father died of
tuberculosis, leaving the family with just eight dollars. Frost's mother died of
cancer in 1900. In 1920, he had to commit his younger sister Jeanie to a mental hospital, where she died nine years later. Mental illness apparently ran in Frost's family, as both he and his mother suffered from
depression, and his daughter Irma was committed to a mental hospital in 1947. Frost's wife, Elinor, also experienced bouts of depression. ==Work==