Obadiah Walker published many books on academic and religious subjects; his most popular work, Of Education, Especially of Young Gentlemen (1673), went through eight editions by 1699. He also wrote on optics, grammar, logic, geography (a description of Greenland), and numismatics. But the historian of rhetoric Wilbur Samuel Howell calls Walker one of the "chief English rhetoricians of the neo-Ciceronian school in the seventeenth century" on the basis of his first book, Some Instructions Concerning the Art of Oratory: Collected for the Use of a Friend, a Young Student (1659).

One of the seven children of William and Isabel Wood Walker, Obadiah Walker was born in Darfield (today Danfield), near Barnsley in Yorkshire; he was baptized on 17 September 1616 in Worsborough. On 5 April 1633 he matriculated at University College of the University of Oxford, which had long had strong Yorkshire connections. Abraham Woodhead, a University College B.A. and M.A. who was...