James Whitcomb Riley: A Life - Hardcover

Van Allen Ph.D., Elizabeth J. Van; Van Allen, Elizabeth J.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0253335914 ISBN 13: 9780253335913

Publisher: Indiana University Press, 1999

Synopsis

"... a thorough biography that should supplant all previous attempts to understand the man." ―H-Net Reviews

"... new, thorough and highly readable... " ―Indianapolis Star

Few literary figures have achieved the fame of James Whitcomb Riley, the most popular poet in America at the end of the 19th century―the height of his career. Legends and rumors either elevate Riley as a hero who gave Hoosiers pride of place, or denigrate him as a drunken author of Victorian doggerel. In this first serious modern biography of Riley, Van Allen sifts facts from fiction to paint the truest portrait of this controversial poet.

About this title

About the Author

Elizabeth J. Van Allen received her Ph.D. in history from Yale University. She is a former historian of the James Whitcomb Riley Memorial Association where she was Senior Editor for and contributor to Keeping the Dream, a book celebrating the 75th Anniversary of the Association.

Reviews

An unvarnished, dutiful, rather dull life of the 19th-century ``Hoosier Poet,'' author of ``Little Orphant Annie'' and ``When the Frost Is on the Punkin.'' When Riley's personal manager, Marcus Dickey, published an official two-volume biography shortly after his death, Riley's popularity (and sales) as America's most-read poet, celebrated for his folksy vernacular verse, eclipsed that of Longfellow, Whittier, and Whitman. Now, on the 150th anniversary of his birth, van Allen's authoritative if humdrum biography must contend not only with the fame-obscured details of Riley's life but with the precipitous decline in his literary reputation. Van Allen's Riley supersedes earlier portraits of the poet as a boozing colloquial rhymester and an upstanding embodiment of midwestern virtues, but her more measured account is correspondingly less engaging. In the post-Civil War Midwest, Riley sowed a few wild oats as an itinerant sign-painter and medicine show assistant, but apart from his hoax in producing a posthumous Edgar Allan Poe poem, ``Leonainie,'' his is a fairly conventional success story. Although Riley's lack of formal education goaded his poetic industry, his ambition for celebrity and money bound him to the successful formula of his top-selling The Old Swimmin'-Hole and `Leven more Poems and the down-home humorous vignettes he read on the lucrative lecture circuit. By 1894 he was a bigger draw on the stagebill than Mark Twain, though a few years earlier his persistent battle with the bottle had terminated another tour. Riley overcame that blot on his reputation, however, and lived to receive an honorary degree from Yale and to have his birthday celebrated as a public event. Historian Van Allen adroitly situates Riley in the contemporary social trends leading up to the industrialized Gilded Age, during which nostalgia for the simple agricultural frontier boosted his sentimental, sententious verse, but she cannot erase Ambrose Bierce's verdict against his ``dreary illiterature.'' The life of a literary local heroof mostly local interest. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0253335914
• ISBN 13: 9780253335913
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368