Emily Dickinson America’s best-known female poet and one of the foremost authors in American literature died at the age of 56 in her hometown on April 6, 1886 due to an illness. Born in Amherst, Massachusetts, Emily was the middle child of a prominent lawyer and one-term United States congressional representative, Edward Dickinson, and his wife, Emily Norcross Dickinson. From 1840 to 1847 she attended the Amherst Academy, and from 1847 to 1848 she studied at the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley, a few miles from Amherst. During her lifetime, she published only about 10 of her nearly 2000 poems, in newspapers, Civil War journals, and a poe