:: May Sarton was born in Belgium in 1912. Her family fled in 1915 and settled in Boston, Massachusetts. Growing up, Sarton wanted to be an actress and she left home at the age of seventeen to pursue this dream. When she found no success, Sarton turned to writing. Her first volume of poetry, Encounter in April was published in 1937. Through the late 1930s and into the 1940s, Sarton published a large quantity of her work. Then in 1950, her mother died. Two years later came the death of Sarton's companion, Marie Closset. In 1958, Sarton sold the family home in Cambridge and moved to New Hampshire. She lived there for fifteen years, continuing to publish poetry and fiction. She then moved to Maine and in the late 1970s began battling breast cancer. In 1982, her long time partner Judith Matlack died. These trying events led Sarton to write reflectively and publish introspective works such as At Seventy. Having suffered a stroke, the early 1990s found Sarton using a tape recorder to produce Endgame: A Journal of the Seventy-Ninth Year and Encore: A Journal of the Eightieth Year. Sarton died in 1995, having published seventeen poetry collections, nineteen novels, and eleven journals.