Lawyer

• Pierpont, John. Airs of Palestine, a Poem. Baltimore: Printed for the author, 1816; Boston: Wells and Lilly, 1817.
• Pierpont, John. Airs of Palestine and Other Poems. Boston: James Munroe, 1840.
• Pierpont, John. The Anti-Slavery Poems of John Pierpont. Boston: Oliver Johnson, 1843; Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Literature House, 1970.

Edgar Lee Masters was born August 23, 1868, in Garnett, Kansas, and spent his youth in Shipley Hill, Petersburg, and Lewistown, Illinois. Masters in 1915-16 depicted the latter two communities in his Spoon River Anthology. Educated at Knox College in 1889-90, Masters went on to study the law and was admitted to the bar in 1891. He practised law and from 1903 to 1911 was partner with Clarence Darrow in Chicago. After his great success with the Spoon River Anthology and winning Poetry magazine's Levinson Prize in 1916, Masters took up writing novels, biographies, and poetry full-time, but his later work was less successful with readers. In 1942, however, Masters won both the Award in Literature from American Academy and the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and the medal of the Poetry Society of America. Two years later he merited the Shelley Memorial Award, and in 1946 a fellowship from the American Academy of Poets. He died March 5, 1950, in Melrose Park, Pennsylvania. He had three children by his first wife, Helen Jenkins (married 1898, divorced 1923), and one child by his second wife, Ellen F. Coyne, an English teacher. Masters is buried in Petersburg, Illinois.

• Masters, Edgar Lee. A Book of Verses. Chicago: Way and Williams, 1898. PS 3525 .A83B65 1970 Robarts Library
• --. The Blood of the Prophets. Rooks, 1905.
• -- [Webster Ford]. Songs and Sonnets Chicago: Rooks, 1910.
• --. Songs and Sonnets: Second Series. Chicago: Rooks, 1912.
• --. The Spoon River Anthology. Macmillan, 1915. B-11/0660 Fisher Rare Book Library. Enlarged edition, 1916. New edition, 1944. PS 3525 .A83S5 1916 St. Michael's College. PS 3525 .A83S5 Robarts Library
• --. Spoon River Anthology: An Annotated Edition. Ed. John E. Hallwas. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992.
• --. Songs and Satires. New York: Macmillan, 1916. PS 3525 .A83S45 Robarts Library
• --. The Great Valley. New York: Macmillan, 1916. PS 3525 .A83G7 Robarts Library
• --. Toward the Gulf. New York: Macmillan, 1918. PS 3525 .A83T6 Robarts Library
• --. Starved Rock. New York: Macmillan, 1919. PS 3525 .A83S7 Robarts Library
• --. Domesday Book. London: Eveleigh Nash, 1921. PS 3525 .A83D6 Robarts Library
• --. The New Spoon River. New York: Boni & Liveright, 1924. PS 3525 .A83S52 1924 Robarts Library
• --. Selected Poems. New York: Macmillan, 1925. PS 3525 .A83A6 Robarts Library
• --. Lee: a Dramatic Poem. New York: Macmillan, 1926. PS 3525 .A83L4 Robarts Library
• --. Parrot Pie: Parodies and Imitations of Contemporaries. London, 1927.
• --. Jack Kelso: a Dramatic Poem. New York: Appleton, 1928. PS 3525 .A83J3 Robarts Library
• --. The Fate of the Jury: An Epilogue to Domesday Book. New York: Appleton, 1929. PS 3525 .A83F3 Robarts Library
• --. Lichee Nuts. New York: H. Liveright, 1930. PS 6525 .A83L5 Robarts Library
• --. Godbey: a Dramatic Poem. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1931. PS 3525 .A83G6 1931 Robarts Library
• --. Richmond: a Dramatic Poem. New York: Samuel French, 1934.
• --. The Serpent in the Wilderness. Sheldon Dick, 1933.
• --. Invisible Landscapes. New York: Macmillan, 1935. PS 3525 .A83I6 Robarts Library
• --. Across Spoon River: an Autobiography. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1936. PS 3525 .A83Z52 1969
• --. Poems of People. New York: Appleton-Century, 1936. PS 3525 .A83P6 Robarts Library
• --. The Golden Fleece of California. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1936. PS 3525 .A83G65 Robarts Library
• --. The New World. New York: Appleton-Century, 1937. PS 3525 .A83N48 Robarts Library
• --. More People. New York: Appleton-Century, 1939. PS 3525 .A83M6 Robarts Library
• --. Illinois Poems. Prairie City, Ill.: James A. Decker, 1941.
• --. Poems. Ed. Denys Thompson. London, 1972.
• --. The Western Illinois Poets: the Early Poetry of Vachel Lindsay, Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg. Ed. John E. Hallwas. Macomb, Ill., 1975.
• --. The Harmony of Deeper Music: Posthumous Poems of Edgar Lee Masters. Ed. Frank K. Robinson. Austin, 1976. PS 3525 .A83H3 1976 Robarts Library
• --. The Enduring River: Edgar Lee Masters' Uncollected Spoon River Poems. Ed. Herbert K. Russell. Carbondale, 1991. PS 3525 .A83A17 1991 Robarts Library
• Russell, Herbert K. Edgar Lee Masters: A Biography. Urbana : University of Illinois Press, 2001. PS 3525 .A83Z86 Robarts Library

Abraham Lincoln was born 12 February 1809 near Hodgenville, Kentucky, and grew up with little formal schooling. Self-educated, he was eventually elected to the Illinois House of Representatives and served from 1834 to 1842. Admitted to the bar in 1836, Lincoln used law as a gateway into politics, which dominated his life. He became Vice-Presidential candidate for the (new) Republic Party in 1856 and was elected 16th President of the United States, serving from 1861 to his assassination by John Wilkes Booth in Washington on April 15, 1865. Lincoln's slave emancipation principles led to the civil war between the North and the South in 1861. He was survived by his wife Mary Todd, whom he married in 1842 in Springfield, Illinois, and one son.

Lincoln's favourite poem was "Mortality" by the Scottish poet William Knox. Its religious melancholy ran through Lincoln's own, always occasional poems, which set down personal thoughts on his life in the context of Biblical time.

• The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. Ed. Roy P. Basler, Marion Dolores Pratt, and Lloyd A. Dunlap. 9 vols. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953-55. E 457 .91 Robarts Library

David Mills was born in Palmyra, Orford Township, in southwestern Ontario, on March 18, 1831, the child of Nathaniel Mills, one of the first settlers in the area, whose farm was on lot 70, on Talbot Road (now King's highway 3), just north of Lake Erie and west of Clearville. After being educated at the University of Michigan, Mills became superintendent of schools for Kent Country from 1856 to 1865. In December 1860 he married M. J. Brown, the "Mary" to whom he addresses "I Feel I'm Growing Old" thirty-eight years later. He embarked then on a public career by publishing The Present and Future Political Aspects of Canada (1860) and next The Blunders of the Dominion Government in connection with the North-West Territory (1871). Mills was elected as a Liberal to the Parliament of Canada for the Electoral Division of Bothwell from 1872 to 1878 and again in 1887. During this period, 1876-78, he was appointed Minister of the Interior, and a member of the Privy Council. During a period out of office, in 1883, he was called to the Ontario Bar. This enabled him to serve as legal counsel before the Privy Council in 1884 on defining the north-west boundary of Ontario. Ontario made him Queen's Council in 1890. Mills was appointed to the Canadian Senate in 1896 after failing to win election. He died in 1903.

• Gemmill, John Alexander. The Canadian Parliamentary Companion, 1897. Ottawa: J. Durie, 1897. 79-80. CIHM 32962
• Hodges, Joyce. "Orford Township, Kent County, Ontario, Canada."
• Vipond, Robert C. "Mills, David." Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online. 1901-1910 (Volume XIII). University of Toronto / Université Laval, 2000.

Woodrow Wilson was the 28th President of the United States (1913-21), founder of the Société des Nations (the League of Nations), and recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1919.

• Ambrosius, Lloyd E. "Wilson, Woodrow." American National Biography Online. American Council of Learned Societies: Oxford University Press, 2000.
• Link, Arthur Stanley. Wilson. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960-. 5 vols. E 767 L65 Robarts Library
• Mulder, John M. Woodrow Wilson: A Bibliography Comp. John M. Mulder, Ernest M. White, and Ethel S. White. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1997. Z 8976 .9 M85 1997X Robarts Library

• Mehew, Ernest. "Stevenson, Robert Louis (1850–1894)."Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online ed. Ed. Lawrence Goldman. Oxford: OUP, 2004.

Wallace Stevens was born October 2, 1879, in Reading, Pennysylvania, and was educated in classics at Reading Boys' High School and at Harvard as a special student 1897-1900. There he acted as President of the Harvard Advocate and published some verse. After several years as a reporter in New York, Stevens entered New York Law School in 1901 and eventually clerked for W. G. Peckham, a New York attorney. Stevens was admitted to the bar in 1904. In New York he worked for several law firms and then joined an insurance firm, the American Bonding Company of Baltimore, which became the Equitable Surety Company of St. Louis. Stevens and Elsie Viola Kachel married in 1909 and lived in New York until they moved to Hartford, Connecticut, in 1916. Until his retirement, he worked for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, moving up to Vice President in 1934. His poem "Pecksniffiana" won the Helen Haire Levinson Prize offered by Poetry in 1920. In his lifetime he brought out the following books of poetry:

• Harmonium (New York: A. A. Knopf, September 7, 1923) York University Special Collections 734
• Ideas of Order (Alcestis Press, August 12, 1935; A. A. Knopf, October 19, 1936)
• Owl's Clover (Alcestis Press, November 5, 1936)
• The Man with the Blue Guitar (New York: A. A. Knopf, October 4, 1937)
• Parts of a World (New York: A. A. Knopf, September 8, 1942)
• Notes toward a Supreme Fiction (Cummington Press, October 13, 1942)
• Esthétique du Mal (Cummington Press, November 6, 1945)
• Transport to Summer (New York: A. A. Knopf, March 20, 1947)
• The Auroras of Autumn (New York: A. A. Knopf, September 11, 1950)
• Selected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, February 6, 1953)
• Collected Poems (New York: A. A. Knopf, October 1, 1954)

Only after World War II was Stevens recognized as a major poet. His awards and honours include membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1946), the Bollingen Prize for 1949, the Poetry Society of America Gold Medal (1951), the National Book Award in Poetry (1950, 1954), and the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry (1955). He read and lectured often at universities and published one book of literary criticism, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination (A. A. Knopf, November 12, 1951). Stevens died August 2, 1955, of stomach cancer, leaving one daughter, Holly Bright Stevens, who edited his letters afterwards. His wife Elsie Stevens died February 19, 1963. They are buried together at Cedar Hill Cemetery in Hartford. See also

• Brazeau, Peter. Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered (New York: Random House, 1983), an excellent anthology of interviews of Stevens' friends and co-workers. PS 3537 T4753 Z616 Robarts Library
• Edelstein, J. M. Wallace Stevens: A Descriptive Bibliography (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973).
• Letters of Wallace Stevens, ed. Holly Stevens (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), a well-edited volume. PS 3537 T4753 Z53 Robarts Library
• Richardson, Joan. Wallace Stevens: The Early Years 1879-1923 (New York: Beech Tree Books, 1986). PS 3537 T4753 Z758 1986 Robarts Library

The son of Sir James F. Stephen, a criminal court judge, and Mary Richenda Cunningham, James Kenneth Stephen, known as "Jem" to his friends, was educated at Eton College and King's College, Cambridge. He joined the secret, apparently homosexual society known as the Apostles, and became a Fellow of King's College in 1885, two years after being hired as tutor to Prince Albert Victor Edward, heir to the throne, who studied at Trinity College 1883-85. In 1888, by then a barrister and distanced from the royal family, Stephen founded a weekly journal The Reflector, but it lasted only for 17 numbers, although he had many literary friends (one of his cousins was Virginia Woolf) and had quickly acquired a reputation as a satirical poet. Stephen was committed to St. Andrew's Hospital, Northampton, in November 1891, suffering from mental illness, likely manic depression. He had struck his head in an accident at Felixstowe five years before--a point after which friends, Virginia Woolf included, began to interpret his behaviour as madness. After refusing all nourishment, Stephen died early February 1892, a few weeks after the prince he tutored. Arthur C. Benson's The Leaves of the Tree: Studies in Biography (London: Smith, Elder, 1911; CT 782 B3 Robarts Library) discusses Stephen's life; and David Abrahamson's Murder & Madness: the Secret Life of Jack the Ripper (London: Robson Books, 1992; HV 6535 G73 L653 1992 Robarts Library) transcribes Stephen's medical records. The claim that Stephen and the Prince were Jack the Ripper is based on weak circumstantial evidence and a psychoanalytic reading of his mysogynistic poems.

• Smith, K. J. M.. "Stephen, Sir James Fitzjames, first baronet (1829–1894)." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: OUP, 2004. Online ed. Ed. Lawrence Goldman. Jan. 2012.