Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, on December 10, 1830, into a prominent New England family. Her father, Edward Dickinson, was a successful lawyer who served one term in Congress and an influential public figure who was treasurer of Amherst College, the school founded by his own father in 1821. The Dickinsons lived for many years in the Homestead, a brick mansion on spacious grounds three blocks from the center of town. Emily was the middle child in an unusually close-knit clan that was virtually a society unto itself: it included her elder brother, Austin, and a younger sister, Lavinia.
Between the ages of ten and seventeen Emily attended Amherst Academy, a remarkable school staffed by young graduates from nearby colleges. Its enlightened curriculum provided students with a broad range of humanistic and scientific knowledge. Dickinson blossomed there among a lively circle of friends, several of whom became trusted confidantes in later years. Upon graduation in 1847 she enrolled in Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley but left after only two terms. Though it is not known exactly when Dickinson began writing verse, one of her poems was printed in the Amherst College Indicator in February 1850.
Dickinson grew increasingly solitary, by the late 1860s becoming a total recluse who never ventured from the Homestead.
Following her death on May 15, 1886, Lavinia Dickinson discovered many of the poems hidden among her sister’s possessions. With the assistance of Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd, the wife of an Amherst professor, Poems by Emily Dickinson was published in 1890. “In many cases these verses will seem to the reader like poetry torn up by the roots … flashes of wholly original and profound insight into nature and life,” wrote Higginson. Subsequent collections were also edited by the poet’s niece, Martha Dickinson Bianchi.
In 1955 the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press published the definitive three-volume variorum edition of all 1,775 poems in the Dickinson canon. In 1958 it brought out a companion three-volume compilation of that poet’s 1,045 letters.