Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1830.

Edward Dickinson, Emily's father, was a lawyer and Treasurer of Amherst College, and Emily recieved an education more extensive than usual for young women of that period - two years at Amherst Academy and one at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary.

For some unknown reasons, Dickinson began to lead a rather solitary life about 1853, when she was twenty-three. Her solitude does not seem to have taken a morbid turn, however, until the death of her father in 1874. From age thirty on, her life was essentially withdrawn from society; and after 1874 she practically never left the family house.

Based on the drafts of three letters to him, it is believed that a Philadelphia minister with whom Dickinson came in contact early in 1854, Charles Wadsworth, was the object of her love. Wadsworth was 41 years old, married, with a family. It is likely that Dickinson's experiences with Wadsworth encouraged what was already a tendency toward solitariness and introversion in her.

Dickinson produced over 1,775 poems in her life. Only several were published while she was alive, but, beginning in 1890, many of her poems have been published, including some whihc probably would not have been were it not for the popularity Dickinson suddenly enjoyed.

In 1950 Harvard University bought all available manuscripts and the publishing rights to Emily Dickinson's poems and issued in 1955 what can be regarded as the definitive (authoritative) edition of her poems and letters in three volumes.

Emily Dickinson died in in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1886.