In the eight years between the publication of West-Running Brook in 1928 and A Further Range in 1936, the Frost family experienced more sadness, joy, disruption—and accomplishment—than many families do in a lifetime. In 1929, Frost's sister Jeanie died after a lifelong battle with mental illness during which Frost had become her guardian. Frost's wife Elinor, daughter Marjorie, and daughter-inlaw Lillian each endured major health crises, including tuberculosis, angina, and puerperal fever, which claimed Marjorie's life in 1934 just months after she had become a mother, and just a year after she wed. But tempering the grief were happy occasions, such as Marjorie's marriage, of which Frost greatly approved, and the birth of three grand-daughters. Elinor and Robert Frost made several cross-country trips for both personal and professional reasons and moved between three different homes in New England; they also began spending winters in Florida for their health.

Now in his mid-to-late fifties, Frost continued his ascent as an artist. In 1931, Frost received his second Pulitzer Prize, this one for The Collected Poems of Robert Frost which comprised his first five volumes of poetry. He was also inducted into the National Academy of Arts and Letters and continued to hold academic appointments and perform well-compensated poetry readings all over the country. As difficult as Frost's personal life was during this period, undoubtedly it would have been harder without the financial rewards that his professional success brought. He paid for Carol and Lillian to move to California to relieve the effects of her tuberculosis; he paid for Marjorie to stay in a private sanitarium in Colorado to treat her own case of tuberculosis; and when Marjorie developed her eventually fatal infection he paid for her to be flown from her home in Montana to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota to receive the most advanced medical care available. Although it may have seemed from the outside that Frost pursued his professional career at the expense of his obligations as a husband and father, in fact, it was these obligations that compelled him to succeed.

While Frost struggled to lead his increasingly care-worn and geographically dispersed family, science and technology marched on, as uncaring and unseeing as “Minerva's snow-white marble eyes” in the poem “Stars.”