Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born on February 27,1807, in Portland, Massachusetts, to Zilpha Wadsworth Longfellow and Stephen Longfellow. Growing up by the ocean influenced him to write. At age thirteen he had his first poem published in a Portland newspaper. At age fifteen he started college at Bowdoin College, where he met a friend named Nathaniel Hawthorne. It was at this time that they both decided to become writers. Longfellow was very good at learning other languages, after college, and then he accepted a position as the college’s first professor of modern languages. First, he planned to study French, Spanish, and Italian. He mastered those languages and began to study German. After three years in Europe, he returned to Bowdoin to begin the position as professor of modern languages. Him being the first, he had to create his own textbooks. For the next ten years he concentrated on scholar writing, teaching, translating, and prose. During this...