Evangeline (English) Paperback - 2004

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born on February 27, 1807, in Portland, Maine. He spent most of his youth in this quiet and charming town that inspired a number of his poems. When he was a young adolescent, he left for Bourdoin College, located about thirty miles from Portland. One of his classmates was Nathaniel Hawthorne, the future novelist who was to play a major role in the genesis of Evangeline. After he graduated, Longfellow spent three years in Europe. He returned to the United States in 1829 to take a position at his alma mater, where he taught literature for several years. In 1835, he and his wife decided to tour Europe. In the course of their travels, his wife took sick and died in Rotterdam. In 1836, Longfellow accepted a position as a professor of modern languages at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. During the seventeen years that he taught at Harvard, he continued to write poetry and translated a number of French and Spanish literary works. In 1842, he left once again for Europe and remarried after he returned to Massachusetts. Several years after the publication of Evangeline, A Tale of Acadie in 1847, he resigned from his position at Harvard in order to devote himself exclusively to writing. The 1860s left Longfellow shattered by the events of the Civil War, the tragic death of his second wife and the death of his great friend Nathaniel Hawthorne. After another trip to Europe, where he was received with full honours, he returned to Cambridge where he spent the last twenty years of his life surrounded by friends. He died on May 24, 1882.