Born on August 12, 1859, in Falmouth, Massachusetts, Katharine Bates grew up in Wellesley, Massachusetts. She graduated from Wellesley College in 1880. After a few years of teaching school she returned to Wellesley in 1885 as an instructor in English. She was made a professor and head of the department of English in 1891 and remained with the college for 40 years in all, retiring as professor emeritus in 1925. During her long career as a teacher she also wrote volumes of poetry, travel books, and scholarly works, among them The College Beautiful and Other Poems, 1887, Rose and Thorn, 1888, English Religious Drama, 1893, Spanish Highways and By-ways, 1900, From Gretna Green to Land╒s End, 1907, The Story of Chaucer╒s Canterbury Tales Re-told for Children, 1909, Fairy Gold, 1916, The Retinue and Other Poems, 1918, Sigurd, 1919, Yellow Clover, 1922, The Pilgrim Ship, 1926, and America the Dream, published posthumously in 1930. While on a western tour in the summer of 1893 she climbed Pike╒s Peak and was inspired by the view to write a poem entitled ╥America the Beautiful.╙ She first published it in the Congregationalist in July 1895; it appeared in a revised version in the Boston Evening Transcript in November 1904 and in its final form in 1911. Set to the music of Samuel A. Ward╒s ╥Materna,╙ the poem became, unofficially but indisputably, the national hymn. Bates died in Wellesley, Massachusetts, on March 28, 1929.
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