A Literary Biography of Robert Frost
Robert Frost was born on March 26, 1874 in San Francisco to William Prescott Frost and
Isabelle Frost. After his father died when Robert was 11 they moved to Lawrence, Massachusetts
where his father's family lived. During his early childhood, Robert Frost displayed a strong distaste
for schools. Because of the resulting tensions and difficulties caused by his attitude, the school work
that he could be persuaded to do was carried on at home, under his mother's supervision. In high
school, Frost applied himself more seriously to his studies. He also began to write poetry.
In his senior year at Lawrence High School, Frost met Elinor Miriam White with whom he
shared an interest in reading and writing poetry. At their graduation in 1892, they shared valedictory
honors as well. Frost entered Dartmouth in the fall of 1892. Frost enjoyed going for long walks
through the surrounding countryside. Although he stayed at Dartmouth for less than one semester, it
was there that Robert Frost was beginning to think of being a poet.
Frost left Dartmouth, returning to Massachusetts where he taught school for one term and
worked odd jobs in several local factories. It was during this period that he first sold one of his
poems "My Butterfly; An Elegy" to a magazine and saw it published in the Independent 8 November
1894. This was the first appearance of Frost's poetry in a publication with national circulation.
In December of 1895 Robert Frost and Elinor Miriam White were married at Lawrence,
Massachusetts. In the five years that followed, the Frosts began to raise a family (a son, Elliott, was
born in 1896, and a daughter Lesley in 1899.) Frost also attended Harvard College as a special
student, continued to write poetry and occasionally saw his work published.
In 1890 Frost's paternal grandfather, worried by Robert's apparent lack of ambition and
despairing of his grandson's ever learning a profession, bought a farm, then known as the Magoon
place- in Derry, New Hampshire, for Robert Frost's use. When he died in 1901, the grandfather left a
will stating that his grandson was to have free use and occupancy of the property during the next ten
years, after which time the farm would legally become his grandson's property.
In the fall of 1900, Robert Frost and his wife moved to their new home with their daughter
Lesley. (Their first child, Elliott, had died at the age of four.) The farm was completely isolated.
The white clapboard house faced west and overlooked two small pastures which were part of the
property. To the north were a vegetable garden and apple orchard; to the south, alders concealed a
small brook that drained out a little cranberry bog.
Against the southern side of the barn were patches of cultivated raspberries and blackberries.
These along with a few peach, pear and quince trees flourished, because of the efforts of a former
owner who had retired there after having worked for many years in a fruit nursery. To the east a
large hayfield stretched to a hardwood grove that also belonged to the farm.
Robert Frost, who especially enjoyed the seclusion, the farm was and ideal setting. Here he
might raise his family and continue, in private, to write poetry. It was here, too, that Frost pursued a
new vocation, a short lived one: that of farm poultry man. He started with a flock of 300 Wuandotte
fowls. Gradually he became more knowledgeable in poultry matters and he even wrote and
published several short essays related to the subject.
At the Congregational Church in Derry in March 1906, one of the leading society events of
the season was the reading of Robert Frost's poem "The Fruit of Flowers." Frost being too shy and
nervous to undertake the reading himself, the poem was delivered in his behalf by the Rev. C. L.
Merriam. It was well received and helped Frost to secure a position to teach English at Derry's
Pinkerton Academy. His methods of instruction were considered unconventional, but effective, and
much to his own surprise and discomfort, Frost let himself be drafted to talk before teacher's
conventions on how to interest students in reading and writing. In 1909, to be closer to the
Academy, the Frost's rented an apartment in Derry Village.
Frost sold the Derry Farm in 1911, moving to Plymouth, New Hampshire, to take up a
teaching position at the New Hampshire State Normal School. In 1912 Frost went with his family (a
son Carol, and the two daughters, Irma and Marjorie, had been born between 1902 and 1905) to
England. He settled there in a house he rented in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire.
Shortly after he settled in England, Frost gathered together a selection of poems he had
written over a period of 20 years. The result was a manuscript intended by the author to possess a
certain sequence and to depict the various stages in the evolution of a young man's outlook upon life.
A Boy's Will was published by David Nutt and Company in 1913.
Frost's homesickness for New England is reflected in his second volume of poetry, North of
Boston, published in 1914.
With the recognition of his work in England and America, a new phase of Frost's life began.
He was earning money as a poet and was also in great demand as a lecturer. Beginning in 1917, he
taught at Amherst College for three years. Subsequently he was to return there in 1926 and remain
as a professor under various arrangements until 1938. He was co-founder of the Breadloaf School of
English in Ripton, Vermont to which he returned to lecture every summer.
At the same time that his literary career flourished and he enjoyed much success in his public
life, Robert Frost suffered several personal tragedies in close succession. In 1934, his daughter
Marjorie died. Her death has been described as Robert's great tragedy and final blow to Elinor.
Elinor Frost died of a heart attack in 1938. In 1940 Robert Frost's only remaining son, Carol,
committed suicide. Frost's daughter Irma was committed to the State Hospital in Concord, New
Hampshire, for a short time and then under the care of Lesley, she finally settled in a nursing home
in northern Vermont.
A year after his wife's death, he purchased the Homer Noble farm in Ripton, Vermont, and
although in his later years Frost lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in Florida, the farm became
for him a place of refuge and restoration, and his final permanent residence.
Up until his death, Frost wrote, read his poetry and lectured. In addition to countless other
prizes and awards, Frost received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry four times and on his 89th birthday in
1962 received a special Congressional Medal of Honor. On the same day, In the Clearing, Robert
Frost's last book of new verse was published.
Robert Frost died on January 29, 1963.
The Division of Parks manages the Robert Frost farm in Derry where the bulk of his writing
was done for his first two books. It was purchased by the State of New Hampshire in 1965. At that
time the farm was an auto junkyard. Major renovations and restorations began in 1974. The farm is
open during the summer months.