Short answers, pulled from the story.
Horace, whose full name was Quintus Horatius Flaccus, was the leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus. He was the free-born son of a former slave and wrote Odes, Satires, Epistles, Epodes, and the Ars Poetica.
Horace was born on the 8th of December 65 BC in the region of Lucania and died on the 27th of November 8 BC at fifty-six years of age. He died not long after his friend Maecenas and was buried near his tomb.
At the Battle of Philippi in 42 BC, Octavian and Mark Antony crushed the republican forces in which Horace served as a tribunus militum. Horace recorded the day as an embarrassment, claiming he fled without his shield, though his account carries his usual self-deprecating humour.
Maecenas was Octavian's right-hand man in civil affairs and Horace's patron. He gave Horace the famous Sabine farm, which included income from five tenants, and brought him into the circle that supported the new regime.
Horace wrote the Odes, the hexameter Satires and Epistles, the iambic Epodes, the Carmen Saeculare, and the Ars Poetica. Quintilian regarded his Odes as the only Latin lyrics worth reading.
Horace is the source of the phrase carpe diem, meaning seize the day, which appears in his work and reflects the Epicurean sentiment running through his poetry. He even punned on his own name, Horatius and hora, in Satires 2.6.
Yes, Horace was the free-born son of a father who had been a slave for at least part of his life. His father worked as a coactor and spent a small fortune on Horace's education, and Horace wrote that he felt no need to apologize for being a freedman's son.