Page "Harriet Monroe" Paragraph 2

Monroe was born in Chicago, Illinois.

She honed her love of literature early.

Her father's library was the perfect haven for a reclusive child, in a household fraught with parental tension and sibling rivalry.

In her autobiography, A Poet's Life: Seventy Years in a Changing World, published two years after her death, Monroe recalls: " I started in early with Shakespeare, Byron, Shelley, with Dickens and Thackeray ; and always the book-lined library gave me a friendly assurance of companionship with lively and interesting people, gave me friends of the spirit to ease my loneliness.