Wallace Stevens was born on October 2, 1879, inReading, Pennsylvania, where he grew up in a typical upper-middle-class family in the American Northeast. In 1897, he enrolled at Harvard as a special student where he began writing poems seriously for the first time. He claims that, while at Harvard, he longed to be like John Keats, the famous British poet, immersed in the beauty of literature and literary pursuits. But Stevens was always pulled in multiple directions, and he was not convinced that a life devoted to literature would be an entirely masculine endeavor, nor a lucrative one.

AsAmerica was transforming into an industrial and financial powerhouse, ideas about men's roles in the world and productive professions were changing. With this in mind, upon graduation from Harvard in 1900, Stevens moved to New York to become a journalist. He believed that journalism offered the best chance for one's writing to...