Manuscript of "The New Colossus" by Emma Lazarus

Emma Lazarus and

Emma Lazarus (1849-1887) grew up in New York and Newport, Rhode Island, and was educated by private tutors. She showed her ability as a poet at a very young age; when she was just seventeen her father published her first book of poetry. She continued to write fiction and poetry, but also did some translation work, translating Goethe and Heine from German to English. At first, her connection to Judaism was tenuous, but as she learned about the Russian pogroms of the 1880s, she began working within the Jewish community, setting up programs to aid Jewish immigrants. She became an early Zionist, promoting the need for a Jewish homeland throughout the 1880s. She continued to publish her poetry, both in The American Hebrew and in secular American newspapers. She wrote the poem for which she is most famous, "The New Colossus," for an auction to raise money for the Statute of Liberty's pedestal. The poem was put on a bronze plaque and displayed in the Statue's pedestal in the years after her death. Its most famous line is "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free..."