American poet, born in Greenfield, IN. He spent several years as an itinerant sign-painter, actor and musician. During this vagabond experience he had opportunities to revise plays and compose songs, and was brought into close touch with the rural folk of Indiana, becoming familiar with their life and speech. About 1873 he first contributed verses, especially in the Hoosier dialect, to the papers, and he soon became local editor of the Anderson (IN) Democrat. In August 1877, over the initials E.A.P., he printed in the Kokomo (IN) Dispatch a poem, Leonainie, in the manner of Poe. 1 The press throughout the country copied the poem, and many critics of acknowledged authority believed it to have been actually written by Poe, until the hoax was explained by the paper in which it first appeared. To the Indianapolis Daily Journal Riley contributed many poems, the best known being a series in dialect which purported to have been written by one Benjamin F. Johnson, of Boone, a farmer. These he published in book form, under the same pen-name, as The Old Swimmin Hole and Leven More Poems (1883). He wrote short stories and sketches, some of unusual merit, but is known almost exclusively as a poet. Of his poems some are in conventional English, many others in the Hoosier dialect of the Middle-West. His materials are the homely incidents and aspects of village and country life, especially of Indiana, and his manner is marked by delicate imagination and naïve humour and tenderness. In 1915, by proclamation of the governor of Indiana, his birthday, October 7, was observed throughout the state, in honour of Indianas most beloved citizen. He died at Indianapolis, IN, on the 22nd of July 1916.
The bulk of his work appeared in The Boss Girl and Other Sketches (1886), republished in 1891 as Sketches in Prose; Afterwhiles (1887); Pipes o Pan at Zekesbury (1888); Rhymes of Childhood (1890); Neighborly Poems (1891); The Flying Islands of the Night (1891), a fantastic blank-verse drama; Green Fields and Running Brooks (1892); Poems Here at Home (1893); Armazindy (1894), which contains the poem Leonainie; A Child-World (1896), reminiscent of his own boyhood; The Rubáiyát of Doc Sifers (1897); Home Folks (1900); The Book of Joyous Children (1902); His Pas Romance (1903); A Defective Santa Claus (1904); and in several books of selections, such as Old-Fashioned Roses (1889), published in England; Child Rhymes (1898); Love Lyrics (1899); The Golden Year (1899), published in England; Farm Rhymes (1901); An Old Sweetheart of Mine (1902); Out to Old Aunt Marys (1904); Songs o Cheer (1905); Morning (1907); and Songs of Summer (1908). In 1913 he issued in six volumes a biographical edition of his works.
See Clara E. Laughlin, Reminiscences of J. W. Riley (1916).