Geoffrey Chaucer

Born around 1342 or 1343 in London, likely on Thames Street, Geoffrey Chaucer was the son of John Chaucer, a prosperous wine merchant with connections to the royal court. No record of his formal schooling survives, though he became fluent in French, Latin, and Italian, the last acquired during diplomatic missions to Genoa and Florence, where he may have encountered the works of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. By 1357 he was serving as a page in the household of Elizabeth, Countess of Ulster, wife of Prince Lionel. In 1359 he joined the English invasion of France during the Hundred Years' War and was captured near Reims; King Edward III paid his ransom. He married Philippa Roet in 1366 and spent decades in royal service, as customs comptroller, diplomat, clerk of the King's Works, and member of Parliament for Kent, all while writing poetry that would transform the English language. Troilus and Criseyde (c. 1385), a verse novel of love and betrayal set during the Trojan War, remains one of the greatest long poems in English. But it is The Canterbury Tales (begun c. 1387), his unfinished masterwork, a pilgrimage frame narrative encompassing twenty-four stories told by travelers bound for the shrine of Thomas Becket, that earned him the title "father of English poetry." Writing in the vernacular Middle English at a time when Latin and Anglo-Norman French dominated literary culture, Chaucer legitimized his native tongue as a vehicle for serious art. Nearly two thousand English words are first attested in his manuscripts. He died on October 25, 1400, and was the first writer buried in what became Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey.

By day Chaucer kept the wool accounts at the London customs house, living in rooms above Aldgate. In The House of Fame he pictured himself after work: instead of resting, he hurried home, sat down 'domb as any stoon' over another book, and read until his eyes were dazed.