Born in Manchester, New Hampshire, Louis O. Coxe has enjoyed a distinguished career as poet, playwright, critic, biographer, and professor. He was educated at Saint Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire, and he earned his B.A. from Princeton in 1940. From 1942 to 1947 he served in the U.S. Navy. In 1946 he married Edith Winsor, and they have four children.

Since publishing The Sea Faring and Other Poems (1947), Coxe has been affiliated with a number of notable universities. He was an instructor at Princeton University in 1947 and returned as a visiting professor in 1962-1963. He was a Briggscopeland Fellow at Harvard University (1948-1949), on the faculty at the University of Minnesota (1949-1955), and finally Pierce Professor of English at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, from 1955 to the present. He has been a Fulbright lecturer at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland (1959-1960) and at L'Université de Provence in Aix-Marseille...