Wallace James Stevens was born on October 2nd, 1879 in Reading, Pennsylvania. His father, a lawyer, sent Wallace to Harvard as a non-degree special student, after which he moved to New York City and worked briefly as a journalist. From there he attended New York Law School and graduated in 1903. On a trip home to Reading in 1904 Stevens met Elsie Viola Kachel (aka Elsie Moll), a young woman who had worked as a saleswoman, milliner, and stenographer. After working for several New York law firms from 1904 to 1907, he was hired on January 13th, 1908, as a lawyer for the American Bonding Company. After a long 6 year courtship Wallace and Elsie married in 1909 over the objections of his parents, who considered her lower-class. For Wallace it was a seismic event; he never spoke to his parents again whilst his father was alive. No one from the family attended the wedding. In 1913, they rented a New York City apartment from sculptor Adolph A. Weinman, who made a bust of Elsie. Her striking profile was later used on Weinman's 1916-1945 Mercury dime design. By 1914 Wallace had become the vice-president of the New York office of the Equitable Surety Company of St. Louis, Missouri. When this job was abolished as a result of mergers in 1916, he joined Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company and they moved to Hartford. In 1917 Wallace and Elsie moved to 210 Farmington Avenue where they remained for the next seven years and where he completed his first book of poems, Harmonium. Wallace was 38. His career was not prodigious in quantity but its quality was exceptional. Stevens is a rare example of a poet whose main output came at a fairly advanced age. His first major publication (four poems from a sequence entitled "Phases" in the November 1914 edition of Poetry Magazine) was written at age 35, although as an undergraduate at Harvard, Stevens had written poetry much of his greatest works were written well after he turned 50. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his Collected Poems in 1955.