Emily Dickinson

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born December 10, 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts, to a prominent family. She studied at Amherst Academy for seven years and briefly attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary before returning home. There she wrote prolifically—nearly 1,800 poems on nature and mortality, lean and acerbic, built on off-rhyme—but kept them mostly to herself. Only ten saw print in her lifetime. After her death on May 15, 1886, her younger sister Lavinia discovered the poems in her desk. The first published selection in 1890 was heavily edited to fit convention; not until Thomas H. Johnso…