The research value of this collection resides in the correspondence and the photographs. It appears that the letters at some point may have been consulted by various Frost biographers, but their depths may not have been fully plumbed. The photographs offer a candid glimpse into several generations of Frosts, but also include a number of posed studio portraits. The collection as a whole complements the Robert Frost papers already housed in the Special Collections Library, as well as those at the Bentley Historical Library.
The American poet Robert Lee Frost was born on March 26, 1874, in San Francisco. His parents, William Prescott Frost, Jr. and Isabelle (Moodie) Frost, had moved to California several years earlier after William found a job as a newspaper reporter. After his death from tuberculosis in 1885 at the age of 34, Isabelle moved Robert and his sister Jean to Massachusetts, and later, to New Hampshire.
The young Robert Frost attended high school in Salem, New Hampshire, where he excelled academically and wrote poetry for the school newspaper. After receiving a high school diploma in 1892, Frost briefly attended Dartmouth College, dropping out within a year. During this time, the poet continued to write, and in 1894 saw his first published poem ("My Butterfly: An Elegy") appear in the weekly literary journal, The Independent. In 1895, Frost married his high school love and fellow valedictorian, Elinor Miriam White. He supported them both by means of a cobbled-together career of teaching and farming, neither of which proved to be particularly successful endeavors.
The ensuing decade saw the birth of six children, two of whom died young. The surviving children were son Carol, and daughters Irma, Lesley, and Marjorie. During this time, Frost also resumed his college education, this time at Harvard, but once again dropped out, after a two-year stint. "We go to college," Frost wrote, "to be given one more chance to learn to read in case we haven't learned in high school." This damning evaluation of higher education helps to explain Frost's lack of success as a college student, but makes one ponder his later role as a college professor.
In 1912 Frost sold the farm he had purchased in Derry, New Hampshire, and with momentous decision and the proceeds from the sale, packed the family up and moved to London. The poet was approaching 40, and discouraged by the lack of receptiveness of American publishers to his work, felt the need for dramatic change. In English publishers he did find a more receptive audience for his poetry, and, within a year, published A Boy's Will (London: David Nutt, 1913). In 1914, a second collection of poems, North of Boston, was published, prompting a rave review by fellow American poet, Amy Lowell. His burgeoning popularity amongst Americans coupled with the outbreak of World War I, brought Frost and his family back to the United States.
In 1915, New York publisher Henry Holt and Company brought out North of Boston for the first American edition of a work by Frost, followed shortly by an edition of A Boy's Will. It was not long before Frost was being acclaimed as one of America's greatest poets. His fame never waned, but only continued to grow throughout his long life. Despite all the attention, and a widening audience, Frost was unable to support his family on the income generated by his poetry and the small farm that he had purchased in Franconia, New Hampshire. Thus he began his lifelong career as an itinerant poet-in-residence, holding various residencies and fellowships at the University of Michigan (1921-22, 1923, 1925-26), Harvard (1939-43), Dartmouth (1943-1949), and finally, Amherst College (1949-1963).
Throughout these years, between the demands of teaching, Frost continued to write and publish his poems. New Hampshire, published in 1923 won the Pulitzer Prize, as did Collected Poems (1930), A Further Range (1936), and A Witness Tree (1942). This, along with the numerous other honors Frost was awarded, was crowned by Frost's celebrated reading of "The Gift Outright" at the presidential inauguration of John F. Kennedy in 1961.
Robert Frost died after suffering a series of pulmonary embolisms on January 29, 1963, in Boston, Massachusetts.
