The American poet Edwin Markham was born in Oregon in 1852. At the turn of the twentieth century, with his wife Catherine Anna Murphy and their infant son Virgil, he moved East, settling first in Brooklyn, and then on Staten Island, N.Y. in 1901, where he made his home until he died in 1940.

Markham's son Virgil, a Wagner College English Professor and Department Chair, donated his father's personal library of 15,000 volumes to the Horrmann Library, Wagner College, on Staten Island. While all subjects are represented, the strengths of the collection are in literature, philosophy, religion and the social sciences.

He also gave to the college Markham's personal papers, including many manuscript letters from well-known literary and political figures of the early twentieth century. Among his correspondents were Franklin D. Roosevelt, Ambrose Bierce, Jack London, Carl Sandburg and Amy Lowell.

A three record set of Edwin Markham reciting his poems (78 rpm, produced by Timely Records) was donated to the archive and converted to mp3 format. Listen to one of Markham's famous quatrains, -- Outwitted. --

Markham is best known for his spirited protest against the exploitation of poor laborers in "The Man with the Hoe", inspired by Jean-Francois Millet's painting of the same title. Published in the San Francisco Examiner in 1899, almost overnight it became a literary sensation. Markham had "sounded a trumpet blast of social justice," one critic wrote, for the poor and oppressed people of the world. The response was astounding. It became the single most commercially successful poem ever published.

Translated into forty languages, including Arabic and Japanese, it was read worldwide and remains anthologized today.

Another widely known poem was "Lincoln, the Man of the People", which Markham delivered at the inauguration of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D. C., in 1922.

He published several volumes of verse, including The Man with the Hoe and Other Poems (1899), Lincoln and Other Poems (1901), The Ballad of the Gallows Bird (1896), and Gates of Paradise (1920). He also edited many anthologies of poetry. His prose work, Children in Bondage (1914), was a landmark in the crusade against child labor.

Timeline of Edwin Markham's Life

Explore a biographical entry on Edwin Markham (created by Dr. Joseph Slade, Markham scholar, Ohio University).