Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894) was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was class poet at Harvard in 1829. After studying law, he went to Paris to study medicine. He was awarded his M.D. degree from Harvard in 1836, the year his Poems was published. After serving as professor of anatomy at Dartmouth from 1839 to 1840, he moved to Boston, where he wrote medical treatises. He married Amelia Lee Jackson in 1840, and the couple raised three children, the first of whom, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., became a famous Supreme Court justice.

From 1847 until 1882, Holmes was a professor of anatomy at Harvard, writing several important scientific papers. In the late 1850s, the Atlantic Monthly, which he helped found, serialized his humorous essays and printed his poems, including "The Chambered Nautilus" and "The Deacon's Masterpiece."

Holmes also wrote three novels—"medicated novels" was his term for them—that dealt with genetic and psychological determinism. (Determinism is the belief that people's ideas, thoughts, feelings, and actions are caused by hereditary and environmental forces.) From the 1860s through the 1880s, Holmes published volumes of poems and essays, as well as a biography of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Holmes was the most famous after-dinner speaker of his time, a leading figure in literary circles, and a witty writer of occasional verse.