Delia Salter Bacon was born on February 2, 1811 in Tallmadge, OH. At age 20 she published her first book, Tales of the Puritans for which she won a prize from the Philadelphia Saturday Courier bating out an entry from Edgar Allan Poe. She then published a play, written partly in blank verse, titled The Bride of Fort Edward. She then devoted the rest of her life defending her theory, espoused in her major work published in 1852 The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded, that Shakespeare was not the writer of the plays attributed to him. That Walter Raleigh, Edmund Spenser and Sir Francis Bacon, where part of a secret society that wrote the plays.
Although she was admired by such contemporary literary giants such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Walter Whitman her theory was met with great skepticism. Hawthorne wrote a forward for her book, but he stated that he did not believe her theory. Delia became obsessed with her theory as her mental state suffered. She was committed to an asylum in Hartford, CT where she died on September 2, 1859 at 48 years of age.