Edgar Albert Guest Biography | Poet

Edgar Albert Guest (August 20, 1881 – August 5, 1959) was a prolific United States poet popular in the first half of the 20th century.

Born in Birmingham, Warwickshire, England, his family moved to the U.S. in 1891. In 1902, he became a naturalized citizen. Beginning at the Detroit Free Press as a reporter, he later began writing daily poems which were syndicated to newspapers throughout the U.S. For forty years, his poems were generally simple and positive and written about everyday life. He was made Poet Laureate of Michigan.

Edgar Guest died in Detroit, Michigan. His work still occasionally appears in periodicals such as Reader's Digest. His great-niece Judith Guest is a successful novelist who wrote Ordinary People.

Lemony Snicket frequently mocks Edgar Guest in The Grim Grotto, the eleventh book in A Series of Unfortunate Events, calling him mundane and overly sentimental. Writer Herman Melville's face is emblazoned on the front of Klaus, Violet and Sunny Baudelaire's uniforms whereas Guest's face is emblazoned on Count Olaf's.