Wallace Stevens was born in Reading, Pennsylvania in 1879. When studying law at Harvard, he published his first poems in the "Harvard Advocate". He worked for different law firms and insurance companies, until he started at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Insurance in 1916 and moved to Hartford, where he remained for the rest of his life. His first book Harmonium was published in 1923 by the renowned publisher Alfred A. Knopf. Even though Stevens earned much praise and admiration from his contemporaries, he was disappointed by the reviews and wrote little the following years. In the 30's he wrote three volumes of poetry, Ideas of Order (1935), Owl's Clover (1937) and The Man with the Blue Guitar (1937). Parts of a World (1942), Notes toward a Supreme Fiction (1942) and Esthetique du Mal (1942) followed. In the meantime he had been elected vice president of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity in 1934. In 1951 The Necessary Angel, a collection of essays about poetry and aesthetics, was published. For his work Wallace Stevens twice received the National Book Award for Poetry (1951, 1955), the Gold Medal of the Poetry Society of America (1951) and the Pulitzer Prize in 1955, the year of his death.