Enid Derham was an Australian poet who taught for most of her life at the University of Melbourne. Born March 24, 1882 to Thomas Plumley Derham, she was educated at the Presbyterian Ladies’ College, and the University of Melbourne where she was granted her MA with High Honors in 1903. In 1904, she was granted [...]

Edmund Blunden was born November 1, 1896, to a pair of schoolteachers in London, England. He was the eldest of nine children. When Blunden was four years old, his parents moved from London to the small village of Yalding, in Kent, which was to serve as inspiration for over fifty of his poems during his [...]

Randall Jarrell was born in Nashville, Tennessee on May 6, 1914, but spent his early childhood in Los Angeles, only returning to Tennessee after his parents divorced. He graduated from Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, and soon after took a job as a teaching assistant at Kenyon College in Ohio. During his years at Vanderbilt and [...]

Look for information about Eliza Acton today, and you’ll find thousands of references to her 1845 cookbook, Modern Cookery for Private Families. She is generally acknowledged to have been the first writer of cookbooks to use the convention of listing all ingredients for a recipe at its start, making it far easier to follow the [...]

John McCrae was born November 30, 1872, in Guelph, Ontario. He began writing poetry while he was still a student at Guelph Collegiate Institute, and continued writing throughout his life. He graduated from Guelph at age 16, and won a scholarship to attend the University of Toronto, the first Guelph student ever to do so. [...]