Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) was an American poet, translator, and professor whose accessible verse made him one of the most popular literary figures of the nineteenth century. Born in Portland, Maine, then part of Massachusetts, he studied at Bowdoin College, where he became acquainted with Nathaniel Hawthorne. After graduating in 1825, he traveled in Europe to study modern languages and later became a professor at Bowdoin. In 1834 Longfellow accepted a position teaching modern languages at Harvard University. Following the death of his first wife, Mary Storer Potter, during a European journey, he returned to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he lived for much of the rest of his life in the historic Craigie House. He resigned from Harvard in 1854 to devote himself fully to writing. Longfellow’s major works include Voices of the Night (1839), Ballads and Other Poems (1841), Evangeline (1847), The Song of Hiawatha (1855), The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858), and Tales of a Wayside Inn (1863). His poems often drew on American history, legend, landscape, and domestic life, while his translations helped introduce European literature, especially Dante’s Divine Comedy, to American readers. Longfellow was admired for his musical language, narrative skill, and moral clarity. Though later critics sometimes regarded his work as overly sentimental or conventional, his poetry remained deeply influential and widely read. He was the first American writer honored with a bust in Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey.
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