American poet Marianne Moore was BOTD in 1887. Born in St Louis, Missouri, her father suffered a psychotic breakdown and was institutionalised before she born. She was raised by her mother, who lived in a relatively open lesbian relationship with Mary Norcross for over a decade. Moore attended Bryn Mawr College at Norcross’ suggestion, where she began writing stories and poems. While a student, she joined the women’s suffrage movement and developed crushes on her female classmates, including Hilda Doolittle. After graduation, she taught at a high school in Pennsylvania, then moved to Brooklyn, New York to live with her mother, publishing her poetry in literary journals. Her work received high praise from Modernist poets Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens, with whom she formed lifelong friendships. She published her first poetry collection in London in 1921, becoming better known in the United States with her 1924 volume Observations. In 1925, she edited the literary magazine The Dial, mentoring and publishing the early careers of poets Elizabeth Bishop, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery and James Merrill. Terminally single and apparently celibate, she lived with her domineering mother for nearly 20 years in a horribly co-dependent relationship. After her mother’s death in 1947, she had a mid-life career resurgence with the 1951 publication of her Collected Poems, winning the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize and launching her to national celebrity. Her admirers included the boxer and activist Muhammed Ali, for whom she wrote the liner notes on his spoken-word album I Am the Greatest. In 1955, Ford Motors invited her to submit “inspirational names” for their new model car; all her suggestions, including “Resilient Bullet”, “Ford Silver Sword”, “Mongoose Civique”, “Pastelogram” and”Utopian Turtletop” were rejected. She moved to Greenwich Village where she lived for the rest of her life, becoming well-known for public appearances in a tricorn hat and black cape. Little is known about her personal life, though biographers continue to debate whether her relationships with Bishop and other female friends were sexual. Hailed in later life as a major American poet, she received the National Medal for Literature in 1968. She died in 1972, aged 84. The living room of her Greenwich Village apartment was later preserved in its original layout at the Rosenbach Museum in Philadelphia.