Wallace Stevens, the author of “The Emperor of Ice Cream,” spent 39 years working for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, in Connecticut.

The Poet’s Premiums

Wallace Stevens was a successful insurance executive by day and a Pulitzer Prize–winning poet by night—but his letters reveal he had existential doubts about the trade-off

By Mason Currey

Photo illustration by Chop Choppish Shop

When I was a young aspiring writer trying to decide what kind of job to get after college, one name kept coming up as a model for me to emulate: Wallace Stevens, the American modernist poet who worked as an insurance executive for decades while at the same time writing some of the most important verse of the 20th century. I can see why the adults in my life found him a laudatory example. Stevens worked for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, in Connecticut, for 39 years, from 1916 until his death in 1955—the same year that he received the Pulitzer Prize for his Collected Poems. His biography suggested that you could have it all: a steady, predictable, well-paying professional career and the creative freedom to write daring, original work. What could be better?

But what no one told me was that Stevens himself had powerful doubts about the path he’d selected and, if he could have done it over again, might have made very different choices.