Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts. Her family was well known in the town. Her grandfather helped start Amherst College. Her father was a lawyer. Emily had an older brother named Austin and a younger sister named Lavinia. They lived in a big house called the Homestead.

Emily was a good student. She went to a school called Amherst Academy. Later, she went to a college for women called Mount Holyoke. But she left after about a year. She kept learning on her own by reading many books, like the Bible and poems.

As a young woman, Emily began writing poems and letters. At first, she wrote just for fun and for friends. But over time, writing became very important to her. Between 1858 and 1865, she wrote hundreds of poems. She copied them neatly and sewed them into little homemade books called fascicles.

Emily wrote to a man named Thomas Wentworth Higginson. He was a writer and helped guide her. She asked him if her poems were good. He became her friend through letters for many years.

In her whole life, Emily wrote almost 1,800 poems. But only about ten were printed while she was alive. Her poems were short. They often used dashes instead of normal punctuation. She wrote about big ideas like death, nature, and faith, using simple things like a bird or a flower.

A few of her poems were printed in newspapers without her name on them. Editors often changed her words and punctuation to make them look more normal. Emily did not like this. She once said that printing poems for everyone was like selling off her private thoughts.

Emily never got married. She stayed in Amherst almost her whole life. She was close to her sister Lavinia and her brother Austin. She also loved a woman named Susan, who lived next door. As Emily got older, she stayed inside more and more. She wore white dresses and often would not see visitors in person. Instead, she talked to people through closed doors or in letters.

Emily got sick later in life. She died on May 15, 1886, at her home. She was 55 years old. Doctors said she died from a kidney illness called Bright's disease.

After she died, her sister Lavinia found almost 1,800 poems hidden in Emily's room. Lavinia knew they were special. She asked two people, Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Higginson, to help get the poems published. The first book of Emily's poems came out in 1890. People changed some of her words to make the poems seem more normal.

Over time, people began to see how special and different Emily's poems really were. In 1955, a man named Thomas H. Johnson printed a new book that used her poems exactly the way she wrote them, with all her dashes and unusual words.

Today, Emily Dickinson is seen as one of the greatest American poets ever. Her old home is now a museum people can visit. Even though she almost never left Amherst, her poems have traveled all over the world and are read by people everywhere.