In 1955, Wallace Stevens received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, one of several major awards that came to him during his career as a poet working alongside a full-time professional life in law and insurance. That same year, on August 2, he died in Hartford, Connecticut, the city where he had spent much of his working life.

Stevens was born on October 2, 1879, in Reading. He went on to study at Harvard University and then at New York Law School, training that set him on a path as a lawyer. His professional life eventually took him to Hartford, where he worked as an executive for an insurance company in Connecticut. He held that role for most of his adult life, while also writing poetry, journalism, and plays.

As an American modernist poet writing in English, Stevens produced work that includes the collection The Auroras of Autumn. His output extended beyond verse — he also worked as a journalist and a playwright — but it was his poetry that brought him recognition from award committees over the course of his career. In addition to the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, he received the National Book Award, the Bollingen Prize, and the Robert Frost Medal. Each of these came to a man who was simultaneously maintaining a career as a lawyer and insurance executive, a combination that marked his life in an uncommon way.

Stevens died in Hartford on August 2, 1955, the same year the Pulitzer arrived. By then he had accumulated four significant literary awards: the National Book Award, the Bollingen Prize, the Robert Frost Medal, and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His collection The Auroras of Autumn remains among the works attached to his name, and the record of prizes he received in his lifetime gives some concrete measure of how his poetry was received during his years as both a practicing lawyer and a writer.