Marianne Moore was born in Kirkwood, Missouri, in 1887. She attended Bryn Mawr College, and lived her adult life in New York City, in Manhattan and Brooklyn. She was the author of numerous books of poems, including most notably Observations (1924), Selected Poems (1935), The Pangolin and Other Verse (1936), What Are Years (1941), and Collected Poems (1951). Her lifelong practice of a radically innovative formal verse, committed to moral courage and spiritual clarity, won her most of the major poetry awards available to an American: the Bollingen Award (1952), the National Book Award (1952), the Pulitzer Prize (1952), the American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal (1953), the Robert Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America (1967), and the National Medal for Literature (1968). She died on 5 February 1972.