Poet and author James Whitcomb Riley was born on October 7th 1849 in Greenfield, Indiana. Known as the “Hoosier Poet” for his work with regional dialects, and as the “Children’s Poet” for his children’s poetry and devotion to youth causes, Riley is best remembered as the author of the well-loved verse book, Rhymes of Childhood. 

Riley grew up in a well-off and influential family. Riley’s father, Reuben Andrew Riley, was a lawyer and Democrat member of the Indiana House of Representatives and he named his son for his friend James Whitcomb, then the governor of Indiana. 

Riley had a spotty education, learning at home and attending his local school sporadically (he did not graduate Grade 8 until the age of twenty). Nonetheless, his was a childhood full of creativity. He learned about poetry from an uncle who was a poet and enthusiast and was encouraged by his mother to write and produce juvenile theatrical presentations. His father taught him how to play the guitar and Riley went on to perform in a local band. 

Life changed when Riley’s father went off to fight in the Civil War in 1861. The family (which already included six children) took in an additional orphan child and suffered many hardships. Riley would base his famous poem, Little Orphant Annie on this temporary foster sibling (both the child and the poem were named “Allie”, but a typesetter made a crucial typo when the poem was finally published). 

Riley Senior returned from soldiering a broken man, partially paralyzed and unable to resume his practice. The family was forced to sell their house in town and retreated to the family farm where Riley’s mother died in 1870. Riley became estranged from his father at this time and left home. He also started drinking excessively, beginning a life-long habit that would both impact his health and his career. 

He embarked on a series of low-paying jobs – house painting, Bible salesman – before starting a sign-painting business in Greenfield. Riley wrote catchy slogans for his signs, in effect, his first published verses. He also started participating in local theatre productions and sending poems to the Indianapolis Mirror under the pseudonym “Jay Whit”. 

When he went to work for the McGrillus Company in Anderson, Indiana shilling tonic medicines in a travelling show that visited small towns around the state, he discovered another calling. Riley both wrote and performed skits promoting the tonics. Eventually, Riley and several friends started a billboard company that became successful enough that he was able to turn to writing in a more committed way, and he returned to Greenfield to do so. 

Riley started sending out dozens of poems to newspapers around the country and many of them – the Danbury News, the Indianapolis Journal and the Anderson Democrat, among them – published the verses. At the same time, Riley began to write to prominent American writers, sending poems and requesting their endorsement. He was successful with poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow who wrote back, “I have read the poems with great pleasure, and I think they show a true poetic faculty and insight.” Riley would finally meet Longfellow in person shortly before the latter’s death in 1882; he famously wrote about the experience and about Longfellow’s profound impact on his work. 

The Anderson Democrat offered Riley a reporting job in 1877. He took it on while continuing to submit poems at journals and newspapers all over the country. Riley would lose the stability of this reporting job when a prank in which he submitted a poem to a journal claiming it was Edgar Allan Poe’s went awry. Spurned by many publishers after this embarrassing incident, Riley joined a travelling lecture circuit and gave poetry readings around the state. A born entertainer, Riley’s readings would become hugely popular and remained a primary source of income for most of his life. 

Eventually, the Poe debacle faded into the background and the Indianapolis Journal relented, hiring Riley as a columnist in 1879; he wrote regularly for them about society affairs while continuing to tour his increasingly theatrical and comedic poetry readings. As his fame increased, Riley dropped his “Jay Whit” pseudonym and wrote under his own name from about 1881. 

Around this time Riley began writing what are known as his “Boone County poems”. They are almost entirely written in dialect and emphasize rural and agricultural topics, often evoking nostalgia for the simplicity of country life. The Old Swimmin'-Hole and When the Frost Is on the Punkin' were the most popular, and helped earn the entire series critical acclaim. In 1883, a friend arranged for the private publication of The Old Swimmin’ Hole and ‘Leven More Poems’. The book's popularity dictated a second printing before the end of the year and it continued to sell for years, bolstered by Riley’s reading tours. 

Riley’s prose style lent itself well to public performance.  With their emphasis on the natural speech rhythms of mid-western dialects, his most famous poems – Raggedy Man, Little Orphant Annie – can look slightly ridiculous on the page. But they come alive when read aloud: 

Little Orphant Annie's come to our house to stay,

An' wash the cups an' saucers up, an' brush the crumbs away,

An' shoo the chickens off the porch, an' dust the hearth, an'sweep,

An' make the fire, an' bake the bread, an' earn her board-an'-keep;

An' all us other childern, when the supper-things is done,

We set around the kitchen fire an' has the mostest fun

A-list'nin' to the witch-tales 'at Annie tells about,

An' the Gobble-uns 'at gits you

Ef you

Don't

Watch

Out! 

This phenomenon is likely the key to Riley’s success with children’s verse, as well as the reason he was able to build such fame and fortune on the travelling lecture circuit. It helped also that he was a confident and talented performer. 

In 1881 Riley was invited to tour with the Redpath Lyceum Circuit, a prominent series that included writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson on its roster of regular lecturers. After a successful first season reading in Chicago and Indianapolis, Riley signed a ten-year contract with the Circuit and embarked on a tour of the Eastern seaboard starting in Boston. Riley toured with the Circuit until 1885 when he joined forces with humourist Edgar Wilson Nye. In 1888, the pair co-wrote Nye and Riley’s Railway Guide, a collection of poems and anecdotes. Nye and Riley also teamed up with another famous American humourist Samuel Clemons (Mark Twain) for joint performances in New York City. Despite contract and agent woes that deprived Riley of his full share of the proceeds, he continued touring with Nye through 1890. 

Riley published his third compilation of work in 1888.  Old-Fashioned Roses was written specifically for the British market and consisted mostly of sonnets; Riley intentionally left his country bumpkin dialects out of this collection. The book was a predictable success in the UK and Riley travelled to Scotland (where he made a pilgrimage to the grave of Robert Burns, a poet with who he is often compared) and England to promote it and conduct readings in 1891. 

Back home the next year Riley resumed his lecture and reading tour, teaming up with millionaire author Douglass Sherley for a hugely successful double bill. Coinciding with this, in a savvy and astute cross-promotion, Riley compiled and published perhaps his best-loved book, Rhymes of Childhood. It’s a work that continues to be popular into the 21^st century.  It also parted the beginning of the end for Riley’s literary reputation. Although he continued to sell out readings in New York and across the US (in fact prospective audience members were often turned away), critics increasingly found his work repetitive and banal. His 1894 verse volume Armazindy was very poorly received. 

Riley gave his last tour in 1895 and spent his final years in Indianapolis writing patriotic poetry for public recitation on civic occasions (with stirring titles such as America! and The Name of Old Glory) and poem/elegies for famous friends. His life’s work of essays, poems, plays and articles was published in sixteen volumes in 1914. 

By this time, Riley was in poor health, weakened by years of heavy drinking. The Hoosier Poet died on July 23, 1916 of a stroke. In a final, unusual tribute, Riley lay in state for a day in the Indiana Statehouse, where thousands came to pay their respects. Not since Lincoln had a public personage received such a send-off. His is buried at Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis. 

Riley’s legacy is not just a literary one. A wealthy man, he left behind the funding seeds for a number of memorial projects, the James Whitcomb Riley Hospital for Children, Camp Riley for children with disabilities and James Whitcomb Riley House  (a museum in which the writer’s personal effects and furnishings from his lifetime remain unchanged). 

And, as a lasting tribute, the town of Greenfield holds a festival every year in Riley's honor. Every October the "Riley Days" festival opens with a flower parade in which local school children place flowers around the statue of Riley set on the courthouse lawn. 

Remembered as both a philanthropist and a poet laureate for the Hoosier state of Indiana, a writer with a distinctive pre-industrial folk ethos and an ear for the humble rhythms of the plain local dialect of the US Midwest, Riley remains to this day a poet of the people.