Robert Frost: The Years of Triumph, 1915–1938

Lawrance Thompson's second volume follows Robert Frost from his 1915 return to the United States, already in his forties and only recently established as a poet after years of comparative obscurity, through his purchase of a farm in Franconia, New Hampshire, where the family lived until 1920 and returned for summers long afterward. It follows the extraordinary run of work Frost produced in these years, Mountain Interval in 1916, which contains The Road Not Taken and Birches, and New Hampshire in 1923, which won Frost the first of his four Pulitzer Prizes and contains Fire and Ice and Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, alongside his long, overlapping teaching career at Amherst College across three separate stretches between 1917 and 1938, where he pushed students toward what he called the sound of sense, the rhythms of actual speech rather than conventional poetic diction.

Thompson had been chosen by Frost himself in 1939 to write his official biography, and this volume, covering the years Thompson knew Frost most closely as a friend, traveling companion, and confidant, follows the private cost behind the public reputation Frost was building as a genial, wise New England farmer poet. It covers the family's repeated tragedies during these same years, the earlier death of Frost's son Elliott from cholera, and then, within this volume's own span, the death of his daughter Marjorie from puerperal fever after childbirth in 1934 and the long illness of his wife Elinor, who had suffered depression for years before breast cancer led to the heart failure that killed her in 1938, the death that closes this volume. Thompson's own relationship with Frost soured considerably over the decades he spent researching the life, and this volume, along with the two that followed it, began a documented shift in Frost's reputation, from beloved rural sage to a more difficult, more self absorbed, and more genuinely modernist figure than his public image had ever suggested.