Laura (Riding) Jackson (1901-1991) was born in New York and educated at Brooklyn Girls' High School and Cornell University. Her first marriage was to the historian Louis Gottschalk, and her early work, 1923-26, was published under the name Laura Riding Gottschalk. Following divorce, her authorial name from 1927 to 1939 was Laura Riding. With Robert Graves she wrote A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927) and A Pamphlet Against Anthologies (1928), and co-founded the Seizin Press. She married Schuyler B. Jackson, poet and farmer, in 1941, renouncing poetry in the same year, and ceased publishing until 1962. Soon afterwards, Laura (Riding) Jackson became her final authorial name.

    She published some forty books during her lifetime, including The Close Chaplet (1926), Contemporaries and Snobs (1928), A Trojan Ending (1937) and The World and Ourselves (1938). Her 1938 Collected Poems influenced Auden, Ashbery and many others. Several other works have been published posthumously. Her collaborations, essays, stories and poems are central to the creative and critical debate surrounding twentieth-century English and American literature.