Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882), the most beloved American poet of his time, was born in what is now Portland, Maine, and died in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Proficient in both the Romance and Germanic languages, he became a professor at Harvard in 1836. There he taught a wide range of European literatures and produced the anthology The Poets and Poetry of Europe. Longfellow had married in 1831, but his wife died in 1835. He then fell in love with Fanny Appleton, a Boston heiress, and wrote about their meeting in the prose romance Hyperion (1839). They married in 1843 and lived an elegant life. His poem Hiawatha was commercially successful, and his other poetry was popular. He continued at Harvard until 1854. Fanny died in 1861, and a grief-stricken Longfellow turned to translating the Divine Comedy by the Italian Renaissance poet Dante Alighieri.