SOURCE: Raffel, Burton. “James Whitcomb Riley (1849-1916).” In Politicians, Poets, and Con Men: Emotional History in Late Victorian America, pp. 135-50. Hamden: Archon, 1986.

In the following essay, Raffel proposes that Riley's drive for money and success—and a skill at marketing—helped the poet commodify his poetry, producing a mass market phenomenon.

In 1899 William Dean Howells declared, in the pages of one of the oldest and most august of American magazines, the North American Review, that James Whitcomb “Riley has known how to endear himself to a wider range of American humanity than any other American poet.”¹ Sales figures fully support the statement. Published in 1883, by 1889 Riley's The Old Swimmin' Hole and 'Leven More Poems had sold over half a million copies.² Between 1893 and 1949, his books sold something like three million copies.³ “No one could equal James Whitcomb Riley,” Russel B. Nye explains. “The public loved him for...