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.
Thomas Banchoff is Director of the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs and Professor in the Department of Government and School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He is the author of The German Problem Transformed: Institutions, Politics, and Foreign Policy, 1945-1995 , editor of Religious Pluralism, Globalization, and World Politics and Democracy and the New Religious Pluralism , and coeditor of Religion and the Global Politics of Human Rights and Legitimacy and the European Union: The Contested Polity .