Stephen Spender was a British Subject who was appointed United States Poet Laureate.

Born in London to Edward Spender and Viola Schuster, Spender grew up in a household dedicated to writing and to the arts. His father was a journalist; his mother was a painter and poet. Even their heritage was diverse, as his father was a Christian, and his mother, Jewish.

His parents encouraged his interest in writing, and he first attended Hall School in Hampstead, then Gresham's School and Charlecote School, where he finished his secondary education. He was unhappy being away at school, and when his mother died at about the same time Spender finished high school, instead of returning home he enrolled at the University College School, a place he later described as "that gentlest of Schools." Later, he enrolled at University College, Oxford. In 1973 he was named an honorary fellow at Oxford. However, he left Oxford without taking a degree, and traveled to Germany.

A formal learning environment did not agree with him, and later in life he remarked that he had never passed an exam, ever. Despite his dropping out of college, he managed to make himself and his work known in literary circles. He was mentored by W. H. Auden and friends with Christopher Isherwood. Later he came to know William Butler Yeats, Allen Ginsberg, Joseph Brodsky, Isaiah Berlin, Dylan Thomas, Jean-Paul Sartre, and T.S. Eliot. He also became acquainted with members of the Bloomsbury Group, especially Virginia Woolf.

His first published effort, Poems (1933) dealt with social protest and justice. It was a theme that would follow and inform the rest of his long career. In 1941 he married a concert pianist named Natasha Litvin. The couple had two children. Their daughter, Lizzie is married to the Australian actor Barry Humphries, and their son Matthew is married to the daughter of the Armenian artist Arshile Gorky.

In 1965 he was named United States Poet Laureate, a position he held until 1966. He served as Professor of English at University College, London, from 1970-1977. Later, he became Professor Emeritus. He was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1962, and knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1983.

Spender died from heart failure in London. He was eighty-six. In 1997, the Stephen Spender Memorial Trust was founded to remember and honor Spender's life and work, as well as to encourage poetry, translation, and freedom of creative expression.