Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) was born and raised in Reading, Pennsylvania. His day-to-day life was conventional. After spending three years at Harvard, he went to work for the New York Herald Tribune, but not liking this work, he left and went to the New York Law School. He was admitted to the bar in 1904 and maintained a private law practice until 1908, when he joined the legal staff of an insurance company. In 1916, he joined the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company and moved to Hartford, Connecticut. In 1934, he was made a vice president of the company, a position he held until his death. Few of his colleagues knew that he wrote poetry. Five years before his death, he told a reporter, "It gives a man character as a poet to have this daily contact with a job."

Stevens began writing poetry in high school and had some of his poetry published in the Harvard Advocate. His debut in a larger arena began, however, with the publication of some of his work in the magazine Poetry in 1914. Harmonium, his first volume, was published in 1923. While he lived in New York, Stevens was briefly involved in literary circles, but he dropped out of these after moving to Hartford. Unlike other poets of the time, he was not interested in political and social causes, so although he maintained an active correspondence with some literary figures like William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore, his work as a poet did not drive the course of his life. His Collected Poems (1954) won a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Among his other works are Ideas of Order (1935), The Man with the Blue Guitar (1937), Parts of a World (1942), and The Auroras of Autumn (1950).