One of the College’s most illustrious graduates, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, a member of the Class of 1825, was born on this day, February 27, in 1807. Garrison Keillor mentioned the poet and his connection to the college this morning on The Writer’s Almanac, as he did last year.

Keillor said, “Today is the birthday of the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow , born in Portland, Maine (1807). He entered Bowdoin College at the age of 15, and one of his classmates was Nathaniel Hawthorne; the two would remain lifelong friends. When Longfellow graduated, the college gave him a chair in modern languages, and he worked with translations for the rest of his life.”