Ella Wheeler Wilcox

1850—1919
Poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox, in large hat with feathers and veil, holding cat to her chest, next to a short stone wall at edge of cliff overlooking water at Sound Beach, Connecticut, 1908. (
Photo by Jessie Tarbox Beals/The New York Historical Society/Getty Images

Prolific poet and journalist Ella Wheeler Wilcox was born in Johnstown, Wisconsin. As a teenager, she published poems in the Waverly Magazine and Leslie’s Weekly. She studied at the University of Wisconsin, but left after just a year to focus on her writing. Wilcox’s essays appeared widely in magazines such as Cosmopolitan, and she wrote popular poetry, generally in plain, rhyming verse. She published her first book, Drops of Water (1872), when she was 22 years old. 60,000 copies of her book Poems of Passion (1883) were sold over the course of just two years. Her other poetry collections include Poems of Experience (1910), Poems of Peace (1906), and Shells (1873).

Wilcox also published books of fiction, including A Woman of the World (1904), Sweet Danger (1892), A Double Life (1890), and Mal Moulée (1885), and two autobiographies, The Worlds and I (1918) and The Story of a Literary Career (1905).

She died on October 30, 1919 at her home in Short Beach, Connecticut.