Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) was an American modernist poet. Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, and educated at Harvard and the New York Law School, he worked as an executive for The Hartford Insurance Company in Connecticut. The photograph by Sylvia Salmi was taken in the 1940s, at which time he was vice-president of the company. In his free time Stevens wrote poems, publishing his first book Harmonium in 1923. Throughout his life he considered poetry as the “supreme fiction,” something that could replace religion in human life, and provide us with a more complete understanding than that provided by science or philosophy. In 1942 he published a set of poems entitled Notes toward a Supreme Fiction, to illustrate the nature and power of poetry.
