Modern

Edwin Arlington Robinson was born on Dec. 22, 1869, at Head Tide in Maine and until 1897 lived at the family home in Gardiner, Maine, aside from several years as a student at Harvard University. For the rest of his life he moved in New York and devoted his life to writing poetry. Robinson earned a small living first as a subway inspector and then in the city's customs office.

Charles G. D. Roberts was born on January 10, 1860, in Douglas, New Brunswick, and grew up near the Tantramar marshes by Sackville. Educated at Fredericton Collegiate School from 1874 to 1876, and at the University of New Brunswick from 1876 to 1879, Roberts quickly published his first book of poetry, Orion, and Other Poems (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1880; PS 8485 .O22 O7).

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound, born on October 30, 1885, in Hailey, Idaho, obtained an M.A. in Romantic literature after attending the University of Pennsylvania and Hamilton College from 1901 to 1906. His first job came as lecturer in French and Spanish at Wabash College, Crawfordsville, Indiana, in 1906, but his resignation was requested.

Dorothy (Rothschild) Parker was born on August 22, 1893, in West End, New Jersey, the daughter of Henry Rothschild and Eliza Marston. She was educated at the Convent of the Blessed Sacrament in New York. Her first job, writing captions for Vogue, led to a career in journalism, criticism, light verse, and short-story, play, and screenplay writing.

Born October 16, 1888, in New York, Eugene O'Neill is the 20th-century's best-known American dramatist. Educated at Princeton, he spent his early years working as a secretary in New York, as a gold-prospector in Honduras, as a seaman on trips to Buenos Aires, South Africa, and Southampton, and as a bit-player in his father's company.

Marianne Moore was born November 15, 1887, in Kirkwood, Missouri, raised largely by her mother, a schoolteacher at the Metzger Institute in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Marianne Moore entered Bryn Mawr in 1905.

Lucy Maud Montgomery, born November 30, 1874, in Clinton, on the north shore of Prince Edward Island, Canada, grew up after her mother's death with her relatives in Cavendish. She started writing poetry in 1883 and published first in 1894 after training as a teacher at the Prince of Wales College in Charlottetown.

Edna St. Vincent Millay was born on February 22, 1892, in Rockland, Maine. Educated in Camden and New York, she graduated from Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1917.

Claude McKay, born in Jamaica on September 15, 1889, came to America in 1912, the year his two books of Jamaican dialect verse came out, Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads.