Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) lived a private life, rarely venturing beyond her home and her close circle of family and friends, but she lived that life intensely, in vivid moments of observation and reflection captured in astonishingly original verse. Considered by many critics and writers to be the greatest of American lyric poets, she did not seek fame, for which she had considerable contempt, but rather kept her writing to herself, sharing small portions of it with her closest family members and friends. Only seven of her poems were published during her lifetime, all anonymously and without her full consent. The first volumes of her poetry, published after her death, mangled the work by "correcting" her unconventional punctuation and her purposeful deviations from grammatical propriety. Only in 1955, with the publication of The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by T. H. Johnson, did the full extent of her achievement become known.

At her death, which occurred in her house in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she was born, Dickinson had produced over one thousand poems. These explored a tremendous range of subjects in language remarkable for its wit, inventiveness, and economy of expression. Taken as a whole, her verses, most of them quite brief, present a complex self-portrait, a sort of spiritual autobiography. Her voice is alternately humble and proud, intimate and aloof, ecstatic and sorrowful, but always questioning, reflective, and intensely alive. She was a keen observer of particulars, but capable of sudden, breathtaking generalizations that synthesized these particulars into truths.

Much nonsense has been made of the few details known of her life, which because of its outward meagerness has invited much speculation. This speculation has centered on her various romantic interests and on her famed reclusiveness. She was born to a prominent Amherst family. Her closest friends were her brother, Austin; her sister, Lavinia; and Austin's wife, Susan Huntington Dickinson. Neither Emily nor Lavinia married. Emily seldom left Amherst, although she did spend one year at Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary, ten miles away, and took a trip to Washington and Philadelphia with her father. Her grandfather was one of the founders of Amherst College. Her father, Edward, served as treasurer of Amherst College, a state representative, and a state senator.

Dickinson attended Amherst Academy before spending a year at Mt. Holyoke. At home again, she delighted in reading books that might "joggle the Mind." She read a few books very deeply, especially the Bible, the plays of Shakespeare, and works by such contemporary writers as Emerson, Keats, Tennyson, and George Eliot. Early on, she befriended Benjamin Newton, a law student who encouraged her writing. His early death led to a period of spiritual crisis during which she turned for advice to a well-known minister from Philadelphia, Charles Wadsworth, who became a close friend. In the late 1850s, she wrote drafts of love letters to an unknown person identified in the letters as "Master," and some of her poems of the period reflect the frustrations and tensions of thwarted romantic feeling.

She corresponded with the critic Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who encouraged but failed to understand her work, and she was courted by a family friend, Judge Otis P. Lord. Perhaps because of physical problems, her last twenty-five years were spent in seclusion from all but her closest friends and family members.