John Greenleaf Whittier was born on a farm outside Haverhill, Massachusetts, into a Quaker family that had worked the same land for generations. There was little money and little schooling. The family’s books were mostly the Bible and Quaker writings, until a teacher lent the teenage Whittier a volume of Robert Burns, whose poems about plain farm life showed him that a poet could write about the world he knew.

He began writing verses of his own, and in 1826 his older sister, Mary, secretly sent one to a newspaper in nearby Newburyport. Its young editor, William Lloyd Garrison, printed it, then drove out to the farm to meet the author, and found him crawling under a barn looking for eggs. Garrison urged the family to send the boy to school. He also, a few years later, drew Whittier into the cause that would define both of their lives: the abolition of slavery.

For the next thirty years Whittier was a working abolitionist. He edited antislavery newspapers, served a term in the Massachusetts legislature, helped found the Liberty Party, and wrote poem after poem against slavery, some of them furious. He was attacked by mobs more than once.

Fame came late, and from an unexpected direction. After the Civil War, grieving the deaths of his mother and his beloved younger sister, Elizabeth, he wrote Snow-Bound (1866). It remembers one winter night in his childhood, when a great storm buried the farmhouse and the family gathered around the fire, telling stories, cracking nuts and reading aloud. Almost everyone in it was now dead. Readers who had lost so much in the war took it to their hearts; it sold so well that it made the poor farmer’s son financially secure for the rest of his life.

Whittier never married, and lived quietly with his sisters and later his cousins. He is also remembered for two lines from his poem “Maud Muller,” about a judge and a farm girl who might have married: “For of all sad words of tongue or pen, / The saddest are these: ‘It might have been!’” He died in 1892.