Book Review

If recalled at all, James Whitcomb Riley is understood as a popular turn-of-the-century regional poet who, in folksy dialect verse, sang the virtues of rural, preindustrial American life. His particular literary territory was the Midwest in its eastern dress—a cozy, comfortable, and largely fictional central Indiana far removed from the raw prairies and plains to the west. Elizabeth J. Van Allen's effort in her life of Riley is to show that the poet's career, if not his poetry, should be viewed in more complex fashion. Fittingly, a frontispiece photograph reveals him in the top hat and elegant attire of a fussy middle-aged dandy—hardly a rustic poet of country longing.

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Riley followed in the footsteps of Will Carleton, a Michigan newspaper poet and lecture performer with a considerable following in the post–Civil War years. After a stumbling beginning, including years as a sign painter, Riley settled into newspaper work with the Indianapolis Journal, where many of his best-known poems first appeared. But it was as an effective stage performer on the lecture circuit, reciting his dialect poems, that he attracted large audiences and began to earn considerable income.

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