Emma Lazarus

Emma Lazarus, born into an old Sephardic Jewish family in New York, nearly declined when asked to write a poem for an 1883 auction raising money for the Statue of Liberty's pedestal — she said she could not write to order. Then she thought of the Jewish refugees she had been helping after the Russian pogroms, and wrote "The New Colossus" in two days.

She died of cancer at 38, and the sonnet was largely forgotten until a friend rediscovered it and had it mounted on a bronze plaque inside the pedestal in 1903. Its closing lines — "Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free" — turned a monument to liberty into a mother of exiles.