Wallace Stevens

Poet

Now considered one of the great modernist poets, Wallace Stevens didn't receive many literary honors until late in life: He was over 70 when he won the National Book Award twice (1950 and 1954) and the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1955. His poems are as enigmatic as the poet, who spent four decades as an insurance executive while writing verse in his spare time. A graduate of New York Law School (1904), he worked in journalism and law, then spent most of his working life in Hartford, Connecticut, rising to vice president at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company. His first collection of poems, Harmonium, was published in 1923 and included the poems "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" and "The Emperor of Ice Cream." Other major collections include The Man with the Blue Guitar & Other Poems (1937), Transport to Summer (1947) and Auroras to Autumn (1950).

Extra credit: Legend has it that Wallace Stevens once had a row with Ernest Hemingway, with Wallace coming out of it on the short end of the stick.

Another part-time poet of the same era was William Carlos Williams, who worked as a community doctor in New Jersey while writing poetry. Williams won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in 1962.