Emily Dickinson, considered one of America's greatest poets, is also known for her unusual life of self-imposed social isolation. Living a life of simplicity and solitude, he nevertheless wrote poems of great power; questioning the nature of immortality and death. His different lifestyle created an aura; often romanticized and often a source of interest and speculation. But ultimately Emily Dickinson is remembered for her unique poetry. In short, concise sentences he expressed far-reaching ideas; between paradoxes and uncertainties, his poetry has an undeniable ability to move and provoke. Emily Dickinson grew up in a prominent and prosperous family in Amherst, Massachusetts. Along with her younger sister Vinnie and older brother Austin, she lived a quiet and reserved family life led by her father Edward Dickinson. In a letter to Austin at law school, he once described the atmosphere in his father's house as "virtually all sobriety." His mother, Emily Norcross Dickinson, was not such a powerful presence in his life; it seems he wasn't as emotionally accessible as Dickinson would have liked. Her daughter is said to have characterized her as not the kind of mother "you rush to when you're upset." Both parents raised Dickinson as an educated Christian woman who would one day be responsible for a family of her own. Her father attempted to protect her from reading books that might "move" her mind, particularly her religious faith, but Dickinson's individualistic instincts and irreverent sensibilities created conflicts that did not allow her to catch up with conventional piety, domesticity and social duty. prescribed by his father and Amherst Orthodox Congregationalism. The Dickinsons were well known in Massachusetts. His father was a lawyer and served as treasurer of Amherst College (a position that Austin also eventually held), and his grandfather was one of the college's founders. Although 19th-century politics, economics, and social issues do not appear prominently in her poetry, Dickinson lived in a family environment that was steeped in them: her father was an active city official and served on the Massachusetts General Court , the State Senate and the United States House of Representatives. Dickinson, however, withdrew not only from her father's public world but also from nearly all social life in Amherst. She refused to see most people, and aside from a single year at South Hadley Female Seminary (now Mount Holyoke College), an excursion to Philadelphia and Washington, and several short trips to Boston to see a doctor for eye problems, he lived his whole life life in his father's house.