Robert Frost, the quintessential poet of New England, was born in San Francisco in 1874. He was educated at Dartmouth College and Harvard University. Although he managed to support himself working solely as a poet for most of his life and holding various posts with a number of universities, as a young man he was employed as a bobbin boy in a mill, a cobbler, a schoolteacher, and a farmer. Frost, whose poetry focuses on natural images of New England, received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry four times for: New Hampshire, Collected Poems, A Further Range, and A Witness Tree. His works are noted for combining characteristics of both romanticism and modernism. He also wrote A Boy's Will, North of… Boston, Mountain Interval, and The Gift Outright, among others. Frost married Elinor Miriam White in 1895, and they had six children--Elliott, Lesley, Carol, Irma, Marjorie, and Elinor Bettina. He died in Boston in 1963.
Ilan Stavans is the author of "The Hispanic Condition", "The Riddle of Cantinflas", & "The One-Handed Pianist & Other Stories" as well as the editor of "The Oxford Book of Jewish Stories" & a dictionary of Spanglish, among other volumes. He has been a National Book Critics Circle Award nominee & the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship & the Latino Literature Prize, among other honors. He teaches at Amherst College.