Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, son of Stephen Longfellow and Zilpah Wadsworth, was born in Portland, Maine, U. S. A. As his father was a rich lawyer, Longfellow received a good education and became one of the most appreciated American poets of his time. The main source of inspiration for his work was the image of the woman, which occupied a central role in each of his poems.
Longfellow's poem Evangeline, A Tale of Acadie was published for the first time in Boston in 1847 and aroused interest as much in his country of origin as in Canada and the world. The author decided to write the epic poem after the Reverend Horace Lorenzo Conolly told him the tragic story of two Acadian lovers separated by the Deportation. Over thirty thousand copies of the poem were sold between 1847 and 1857 and in the following century, it went through no less than two hundred seventy editions and was translated into more than one hundred different languages. This is the reason why the Evangeline poem can be read today in French, as well as in German, Swedish or Japanese.