James Whitcomb Riley

James Whitcomb Riley was born in 1849 in Greenfield, Indiana, the son of a lawyer who wanted him to become a jurist. He left school, painted signs, played music and worked as a barker for travelling medicine sellers. In 1877 he passed off a poem of his own as an unpublished work by Edgar Allan Poe, to show that critics judged signatures and not verses; the scandal cost him his post. A columnist for the Indianapolis Journal from 1879 to 1888, he filled halls with his tours. He never married and died in Indianapolis in 1916.

In the catalogue 1

• PoetryLittle Orphant AnnieJames Whitcomb Riley · 1885LiteraturePublic domain