About James Whitcomb Riley
 James Whitcomb Riley was born on October 7, 1849 in Greenfield, Indiana, surrounded by farmland and primitive forests. The wooden planked National Road, which American pioneers and settlers used to travel to the western half of the nation, ran right through Greenfield. The area was diverse in culture, with people from many different homelands, though outwardly appearing as rough wilderness and newly settled country.
The critic, Hamlin Garland, described it after a visit by saying, "To my eyes it was the most unpromising field for art, especially for the art of verse. The landscape had no hills, no lakes, no streams of any movement or beauty. Ragged fence-rows, flat and dusty roads, fields of wheat alternating with clumps of trees - these were the features of a country which to me was utterly commonplace - and yet from this dusty, drab, unpromising environment, Riley had been able to draw the honey of woodland poesy, a sweet in which a native fragrance as of basswood and buckwheat bloom mingled with hints of an English meadow and the tang of a Canada thistle."
Riley's father, being a frontier politician and lawyer, named his son after an Indiana governor, James Whitcomb. Riley's mother was, of course, a homemaker, and she also wrote poetry. Riley had a difficult time academically, but possessed a talent for language, especially that of his own people. His father wanted him to become a lawyer, but Riley did not apply himself to law. For a time he traveled the American Midwest as a sign painter. He also traveled with a medicine salesman, and drew crowds by playing songs and performing impersonations of people he had met in his travels.
Riley's childhood and home were also great influences on him. His most famous poems were about people and situations from his real life. His poems, "The Raggedy Man," and "Little Orphant Annie," are about a hired hand and an orphan girl who helped on the family farm. The farmhand and Annie told the local children stories that Riley immortalized in his work. His poems, though of epic proportion in many senses, told of everyday things.
|