Selected Poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Kennebec Large Print Perennial Favorites Collection) - Softcover

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was perhaps the most admired American writer of the 19th century, and his works were extraordinary bestsellers at home and abroad. Longfellow's immense popularity helped raise the status of poetry in America, and some of his works -- Hiawatha, The Wreck of the Hesperus, Evangeline, The Courtship of Miles Standish, and Paul Revere's Ride -- have become inseparable parts of the American heritage.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born in 1807 in Portland, Maine, and he became a professor of modern languages at Harvard. His most famous narrative poems include "The Song of Hiawatha, Paul Revere's Ride", "The Village Blacksmith," "The Wreck of the Hesperus." From his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne, Longfellow got a brief outline of a story from which he composed one of his most favorite poems, "Evangeline." The original story had Evangeline wandering about New England in search of her bridegroom. One of the first poets to take the landscape and stories of North America as his subjects, Longfellow became immensely popular all over the world, and he was the first American commemorated in the Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey. He was given honorary degrees at the great universities of Oxford and Cambridge, invited to Windsor by Queen Victoria, and called by request upon the Prince of Wales. He was also chosen a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences