Born in Beverly, Massachusetts, Woodberry graduated from Harvard College in 1877, and became professor of English at the University of Nebraska.

In 1891—1904 he was professor of comparative literature at Columbia University. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1930 he was posthumously awarded one of the first three Frost Medals for lifetime achievement in poetry by the Poetry Society of America. He wrote a number of books as well.

• A History of Wood engraving (1883)
• Studies in Letters and Life (1890)
• Heart of Man (1899)
• Wild Eden (1899)
• Makers of Literature (1900)
• Nathaniel Hawthorne (1902)
• America in Literature (1903)
• Swinburne (1905)
• The Torch: Eight Lectures on Race Power in Literature (1905)
• Emerson (1907)
• The Appreciation of Literature (1907)
• Great Writers (1907)
• Life of Poe (two volumes, 1909)
• The Inspiration of Poetry (1910)
• Wendell Phillips (1912)
• A Day at Castrogiovanni (1912)
• North Africa and the Desert (1914)
• Two Phases of Criticism (1914)

Other publications:

• Life of Edgar Allan Poe in the "American Men of Letters" series (1885)
• The North Shore Watch, and Other Poems (1890)
• With Edmund Clarence Stedman, Works of Edgar Allan Poe (ten volumes, 1895)
• Collected Poems (1903)
• The Kingdom of All Souls, poems, (1912)
• The Flight and Other Poems (1914)

He edited The complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1892); Lamb's Essays of Elia (1892); The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, with E. C. Stedman (1894); and Select Poems of Aubrey de Vere (1894). He wrote compositions in the "National Studies in American Letters," and Columbia University Studies in Comparative Literature, (nine volumes).

"Defeat is not the worst of failures. Not to have tried is the true failure." George E. Woodberry Quotes...The Quotations Page at www.quotationspage.com

"The sense that someone else cares always helps, because it is the sense of love" George E. Woodberry quotes at en.thinkexist.com