Perhaps nothing has immortalized New England’s rugged beauty better than the lyrical poetry of Robert Frost. Born in San Francisco in 1874, Frost moved east to Lawrence, Massachusetts, with his mother and sister after his father’s death. He later attended Dartmouth College and Harvard University without earning a degree, teaching and farming in New Hampshire to earn a living while also continuing to write the poetry he began as a teenager. Though Frost was first published two years after graduating high school, when The New York Independent ran “My Butterfly: An Elegy,” he struggled with rejections for years, finally moving to England in 1912 in search of better opportunities.

Frost’s writing career gained traction when his first collection, A Boy’s Will, was published in England in 1913. His second, North of Boston (1914), solidified his reputation, and upon his return to the U.S. in 1915, Frost found he had become a beloved literary figure. His plainspoken style and rumination on the quieter everyday human struggles earned Frost four Pulitzer Prizes for poetry and a reading at President John F. Kennedy’s inauguration. He died in 1963 at age 88.