1896

Robert Frost, our distinguished poet and philosopher classmate, reached his 82nd birthday, March 26, The Burlington (Vt.) Free Press marked the occasion with a picture of Robert and the following story:

"Although the New England versemaker lives now in an old farmhouse near the Breadloaf Mountain he helped toward fame, Frost comes from across the U. S. in San Francisco. He was born there on March 26, 1875, the son of a New Englander who sympathized with the south and so named the future poet Robert E. Lee.

Frost's father died when his son was only 10, and the boy's mother, a Scot, immediately moved to Lawrence, Mass.

It was in high school at Lawrence that Frost first read Virgil, the one experience above all others which he says caused him to become a poet.

After high school, he went to Dartmouth for a year, but gave it up to go to work in one of the mills in Lawrence. He was married at 20 to Elinor M. White (who died in 1938), and they had four daughters, two of whom are living, and a son, deceased.

Although Frost tried college again, this time Harvard for two years, he never received a regular degree. But since then he has beenawarded honorary degrees from 16 colleges - including Dartmouth and Harvard.

In his long life, Frost has been a countryschool teacher, a cobbler, a small-town newspaper editor and a farmer - but mostly thelatter. For 11 years he lived in near isolationon a farm in New Hampshire, but it failedand he decided to travel to England with hiswife.

In England he came under the influenceof poets Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Gibsonand wrote his first book, "A Boy's Will," published in 1913. When he returned to the U. S.in 1915, he found himself famous.

He has received the Pulitzer Prize for hispoetry four times, in 1924, 1931, 1937 and 1943"

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