Authors

American · 1807–1882

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was the most popular American poet of the nineteenth century, whose narrative poems — The Song of Hiawatha (1855), Evangeline (1847), Paul Revere's Ride — were memorized by generations of American schoolchildren. He was the first American to translate Dante's Divine Comedy (1867). A professor at Harvard for eighteen years, he was enormously internationally famous; he is the only American represented in Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey. His personal life was shadowed by the deaths of his first and second wives.