Robert Frost was born in San Francisco on March 26, 1874. While still a young boy, Frost's father died and the family moved to Massachusetts. Frost attended Dartmouth College for less than a semester, after which he moved back to Massachusetts to teach and work as a reporter for a local newspaper. Frost returned to college in 1897 to attend Harvard, but he did not graduate. Frost was essentially a self-educated man.

After Harvard, Frost married and sold the farm he had inherited. With the proceeds of the sale, he moved his family to England, where he wrote for ten years without success. His first works were published by a London publisher in 1913.

Frost's works, once printed, met immediate acclaim. His collection of poems A Further Range won the Pulitzer Prize in 1937. Though he is sometimes cast as a pastoral poet, Frost was also a fierce intellectual with a decidedly dark view of himself and the world. Frost would use rural settings as a metaphor for his philosophical views. Robert Frost is one of the best-known and most beloved of American poets. He died in Boston on January 29, 1963.