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.
Born in Daresbury, England,in 1832, Charles Luthwidge Dodgson is better known by his pen mane of Lewis Carroll. He became a minister of the Church of England and a lecturer in mathematics at Christ Church College, Oxford. He was the author, under his own name, of An Elementary Treatise on Determinants (1867), Symbolic Logic (1896), and other scholarly treatises which would hardly have given him a place in English literature. Charles Dodgson might have been completely forgotten but for the work of his alter ego, Lewis Carroll. Lewis Carroll, shy in the company of adults, loved children and knew and understood the world of the imagination in which the most sensitive of them lived. So he put… the little girl Alice Liddell into a dream-story and found himself famous as the author of Alice in Wonderland (1865). Through the Looking Glass followed in 1871. In recent years Carroll has been taken quite seriously as a major literary artist for adults as well. His works have come under the scrutiny of critics who have explained his permanent attractiveness in terms of existential and symbolic drama: The Alice books dramatize psychological realities in symbolic terms, being commentary on the nature of the human predicament rather than escape from it. In addition to his writing, Carroll was also a pioneering photographer, and he took many pictures of young children, especially girls, with whom he seemed to empathize.Donald Gray is Professor of English at Indiana University. He is the editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Alice in Wonderland, and of the anthology Victorian Poetry.