Robert Frost letters to Leonard Bacon (MSS-0119)

Biographical/Historical Note

Leonard Bacon, son of Nathaniel Bacon and Helen Hazard Bacon, was born May 26, 1887, in Syracuse, New York. A poet and literary critic, he was class poet and editor of the Literary Magazine at Yale University, from which he was graduated in 1909. Upon graduation, he taught English at the University of California at Berkeley until 1923, when he left California and returned to Peace Dale, Rhode Island, to concentrate exclusively on his writing. He won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry in 1940 for his work, “Sunderland Capture;” he was also a literary critic for Saturday Review of Literature and Harper’s. He married Martha Stringham in 1912 and was the father of three children: Helen, Alice, and Martha. He died January 1, 1954.

Robert Frost was an American poet born in 1874 and died in 1963. Frost and Bacon met in Franconia, New Hampshire through the Reverend and Mrs. J. Warner Fobes, who owned property near Frost and were relatives of Bacon. Bacon dedicated his 1936 book, “Rhyme and Punishment,” to Frost.