Margaret Widdemer (September 30, 1884 – July 14, 1978) was an American poet and novelist. She won the
Pulitzer Prize (known then as the Columbia University Prize) in 1919 for her collection The Old Road to Paradise, shared with
Carl Sandburg for Cornhuskers.[1][2][a]
Biography
Margaret Widdemer was born in
Doylestown, Pennsylvania,[3] and grew up in
Asbury Park, New Jersey, where her father, Howard T. Widdemer, was a minister of the First Congregational Church. She graduated from the
Drexel Institute Library School in 1909.[4] She first came to public attention with her poem The Factories, which treated the subject of
child labor. In 1919, she married
Robert Haven Schauffler (1879–1964), a widower five years her senior. Schauffler was an author and cellist who published widely on poetry, travel, culture, and music. His papers are held at the
University of Texas at Austin.
^The
Pulitzer Prize for Poetry was inaugurated in 1922 but the sponsoring organization now considers the first winners to be the three recipients of 1918 and 1919 awards "made possible by a special grant from The Poetry Society".[1]
References
^
ab"Poetry". The Pulitzer Prizes. Retrieved 2013-11-24.