Bacon was educated at the University of Chicago and at the University of California. He founded the Carmel Bach Festival in 1935 and served as a professor of music at the San Francisco Conservatory and Converse College in South Carolina. He received the Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for his Symphony in D. However, his main compositional interest was in the area of song. He set the work of many American poets, including Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, to music. Bacon often composed with non-diatonic scales and was a master of counterpoint. He was also a painter, and wrote about his and other composers' music. ~ Lynn Vought, Rovi