Maxine Kumin left an unrivaled legacy as a pioneering poet and feminist. The Pawnbroker's Daughter charts her journey from a childhood in a Jewish community in Depression-era Philadelphia, where Kumin's father was a pawnbroker, to Radcliffe College, where she comes into her own as an intellectual and meets the soldier-turned-Los Alamos scientist who would become her husband; to her metamorphosis from a poet of "light verse" to a "poet of witness"; to her farm in rural New England, the subject and setting of much of her later work.

Against all odds, Kumin channels her dissatisfaction with the life that is expected of her as a wife and a mother into her work as a feminist and one of the most renowned and remembered twentieth-century American poets.