Ridgely Torrence

Frederic Ridgely Torrence (November 27, 1874 – December 25, 1950) was an American poet and editor. He received the Shelley Memorial Award in 1942 and the Academy of American Poets' Fellowship in 1947.

Early life and education

Born on November 27, 1874, in Xenia, Ohio, Torrence was the eldest child of Captain David Findley Torrence and Mary Ridgely Torrence. His father was a lumber dealer. His grandfather, John Torrence, founded Xenia and Lexington, Kentucky. He had a brother, Findley McDowell Torrence, who attended Harvard University and married a hometown woman, Patricia Broadstone.

He had tutors while he was growing up and attended Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, from 1893 to 1895 and transferred to Princeton University. He withdrew from Princeton after he suffered an illness that prevented him from returning to school in 1896.

Early career

In the late 1890s he settled in Greenwich Village, in New York City, working as a librarian at the Astor Library from 1897 to 1901, and then at Lenox Library until 1903. He was assistant editor at The Critic from 1903 to 1904. He worked for the Japanese special envoy to the United States as a secretary in 1905. He was the fiction editor at Cosmopolitan magazine, from 1905 to 1907.

Poet and playwright

During his early year in New York, he became part of a circle of poets that included E. A. Robinson, William Vaughn Moody, and Robert Frost. In 1900, he published The House of a Hundred Lights, which Edmund Clarence Stedman helped him revise.

The verse plays, showing the influence of John Millington Synge, showed realistic portrayals of African Americans, and a revolt against their station in society. While his verse dramas were published as books, they were not produced as plays.