Two roads diverged in a yellow wood . . .” One hundred years after its first publication in August 1915, Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken” is so ubiquitous that it’s easy to forget that it is, in fact, a poem. Widely admired as the poetry columnist for the New York Times Book Review, David Orr deftly illuminates the poem’s enduring greatness while revealing its mystifying contradictions, in THE ROAD NOT TAKEN: Finding America in the Poem Everyone Loves and Almost Everyone Gets Wrong. With diligence and humor, Orr examines the poem’s cultural influence, its artistic complexity, and its historical journey from the margins of the First World War all the way to its canonical place today as a true masterpiece of American literature. Please let me know if you would like an interview with David Orr.

Published for the poem’s centennial—along with a new Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of Frost’s poems, edited and introduced by Orr himself— THE ROAD NOT TAKEN is a treasure for all readers, a triumph of artistic exploration and cultural investigation that sings with its own unforgettably poetic voice.

ABOUT DAVID ORR
David Orr is the poetry columnist for The New York Times Book Review. He is the winner of the Nona Balakian Prize from the National Book Critics Circle, and his writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Slate, and The Yale Review. He holds a BA from Princeton and a JD from Yale Law School, and is a visiting professor at Cornell University.

ABOUT ROBERT FROST
Robert Lee Frost was born in San Francisco in 1874. When he was ten, his father died and he and his mother moved to New England. He attended school at Dartmouth and Harvard, worked in a mill, taught, and took up farming, before he moved to England, where his first books of poetry, A Boy's Will (1913) and North of Boston (1914), were published. North of Boston brought him recognition as the preeminent voice of New England and as one of America’s major poets. In 1915 he returned to the United States and settled on a farm in New Hampshire. Four volumes of his poetry, New Hampshire (1923), Collected Poems (1930), A Further Range (1936), and A Witness Tree (1942) were all awarded the Pulitzer Prize. He died in 1963.