The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume 4

A revelatory new volume of Robert Frost’s correspondence, illuminating one of America’s most renowned poets at the height of his literary fame and the depths of personal tragedy. By the late 1930s, Robert Frost had achieved bona fide celebrity. He won his third Pulitzer Prize for A Further Range, published in 1936, and he had become an in-demand lecturer nationwide. The penultimate volume of The Letters of Robert Frost—which presents 606 letters, most for the first time—sheds new light on the poet’s inner life as he aged into his sixties and early seventies. These were heady days indeed—from summers at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont, to prestigious fellowships at Harvard and Dartmouth, to winter retreats at the Florida home he affectionately called “Pencil Pines.” Yet even as his literary reputation flourished, personal tragedy struck with devastating force. In 1938, some six months after undergoing surgery for breast cancer, his wife, Elinor, succumbed to heart failure. Two years later, in 1940, his son Carol died by suicide. Between these losses, Frost fell in love with Kathleen “Kay” Morrison, who was married to Harvard professor Theodore Morrison. She soon became Frost’s secretary—though not his wife, as he had hoped—and he credited her with renewing his poetic vitality. In 1942, he published his acclaimed seventh collection, A Witness Tree, for which he won his fourth, and final, Pulitzer Prize. Thoroughly annotated and accompanied by a biographical glossary and detailed chronology, volume 4 of The Letters of Robert Frost offers a strikingly intimate portrait of a towering American poet.