Robert Herrick

Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1868, Robert Welch Herrick was an American novelist associated with a younger generation of realists. His fiction is often described as closely engaged with the pressures of industrial society and the inner conflicts it created for people trying to find a decent life within it.

Herrick studied at Harvard and went on to teach at the University of Chicago, where he was a professor of English for many years. Alongside his academic work, he built a substantial writing career, publishing novels, short fiction, and other prose.

Later in life, he also served briefly as acting governor of the United States Virgin Islands. He died there in 1938, leaving behind a body of work remembered for its thoughtful, socially aware picture of American life.