Thomas William Parsons was born in Boston in 1819. He attended Boston Latin School for six years, but did not graduate.  In 1836, Parsons and his father sailed to Italy where he first began translating Dante. Parsons returned to Boston in 1837 and studied medicine at Harvard, but again he did not graduate. In 1853, Harvard awarded him an honorary M.A. While Parsons does not allude to having any profession or livelihood, it is known that he practiced dentistry in Boston. Parsons lived in Europe twice: the first time in Italy for a year in 1847 and then in England from 1871-1872. He married Hannah Allen (1921-1888) in 1857. The First Ten Cantos of the Inferno of Dante Alighieri: Newly Translated into English Verse, which Parsons issued privately in 1843, was the earliest published American translation of Dante of any considerable length. In later years he published the Inferno (1867) and a large portion of the Purgatorio. After 1872, Parsons focused only on his literary career and his best-known poem is “On a Bust of Dante.” He died in Scituate, Massachusetts in 1892.