James Whitcomb Riley |James Whitcomb Riley| James Whitcomb
Riley, c. 1913 October 7, 1849| |Died||July 22, 1916
Indianapolis, Indiana, United States |Resting place||Crown Hill
Cemetery| Benjamin P. Johnson of Boone James Whitcomb Riley
(October 7, 1849 – July 22, 1916) was an American writer, poet,
and best selling author. During his lifetime he was known as the
"Hoosier Poet" and "Children's Poet" for his dialect works and
his children's poetry respectively. His poems tended to be
humorous or sentimental, and of the approximately one thousand
poems that Riley authored, the majority are in dialect. His
famous works include "Little Orphant Annie" and "The Raggedy
Man". Riley began his career writing verses as a sign maker and
submitting poetry to newspapers. Thanks in part to an
endorsement from poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, he eventually
earned successive jobs at Indiana newspaper publishers during
the latter 1870s. Riley gradually rose in prominence during the
1880s through his poetry reading tours. He tr