The Song of Hiawatha

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born on February 27, 1807, in Portland, Maine (then part of Massachusetts), into a prominent New England family. He graduated from Bowdoin College in 1825 and, after studying languages in Europe, returned to teach modern languages at Bowdoin and later at Harvard College, where he held a professorship for many years. Longfellow’s early travels and scholarly work shaped his literary career; he published his first major poetry collection, Voices of the Night (1839), which included popular poems such as “A Psalm of Life.” He went on to write narrative works that captured the American imagination, including Evangeline (1847), The Song of Hiawatha (1855), and Paul Revere’s Ride (1860), becoming the most widely read American poet of the nineteenth century.

Longfellow’s personal life was marked by both domestic happiness and profound tragedy. His first wife, Mary Storer Potter, died in 1835 during a trip to Europe; in 1843 he married Frances “Fanny” Appleton, with whom he had six children and lived in the historic Craigie House in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Fanny’s death in a fire in 1861 left him deeply bereaved. He retired from teaching in 1854 to devote himself fully to writing and later produced a complete translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Longfellow died on March 24, 1882, in Cambridge. His accessible, lyrical verse helped shape national identity and earned him lasting recognition, including a bust in Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey—the first American so honored.