American poet and activist Emma Lazarus was BOTD in 1849. Born in New York City to a wealthy Jewish family, she was educated by tutors, becoming fluent in German, French and Italian. She began writing poetry in her early teens, and was mentored by Transcendentalist poet Ralph Waldo Emerson. She published her first volume of poetry in 1867, including English translations of poems by Friedrich Schiller, Heinrich Heine, Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo. She published poems regularly in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine and Scribner’s Monthly over the next decade, alongside critical studies of Heine and Johann von Goethe. A committed Socialist, she advocated and provided vocational training for Jewish immigrants. She is best known for her 1883 poem The New Colossus, written to raise money for a pedestal at the base of the Statue of Liberty. Imagining the statue welcoming immigrants to the new country, Lazarus’ stirring words “Give me your tired, your poor / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” became an immediate success, published in the New York Times and other periodicals, and eventually cast onto a bronze plaque and mounted onto the statue’s pedestal. Lazarus never married or had children, and literary critics have pointed to evidence of same-sex attraction in her work, particularly the poem Assurance. She died in 1887, aged 38.