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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2009
In early 1892, Oakland and San Francisco editors began receiving letters suggesting that local newspapers and journals would do well to print the poems of a young Oakland school principal, Charles Edwin Markham. Signed “George Roy Jones,” the letters pointed out that since Markham's work had already been published in Harper's, Scribner's, and the Century, the three leading eastern magazines, it was high time that Californians took notice. The writer of the letters was Markham himself, using Walt Whitman's trick to drum up interest in his own poetry. Markham was fond of pseudonyms, having already toyed with half a dozen noms de plume, but this time he no doubt chose to disguise himself to avoid the appearance of immodesty and to conceal his frustration at the elusiveness of fame. He had published individual poems in some eminently respectable magazines, but he wanted a book to his credit. He was only a few months from his fortieth birthday and was depressed by the recent death of his mother and the collapse of a second marriage. Nothing in his personal life seemed to be going right; he was growing old, and he had failed to achieve his potential as a writer.
1. Unless otherwise indicated, all letters and manuscripts used in this article are from the Markham Archives, Horrmann Library Wagner College, Staten Island, New York. Bierce's letters to Markham have never been published, although short parts have appeared in Goldstein, Jesse Sidney, “Edwin Markham, Ambrose Bierce, and The Man With a Hoe” Modern Language Notes, 58 (03, 1943), 165–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
2. Lezinsky's slight distinction rests on his correspondence with Walt Whitman.
3. See Goldstein, Jesse Sidney, “Two Literary Radicals: Garland and Markham in Chicago, 1893,” American Literature, 17 (05, 1945), 152–160.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
4. Pollard would later become one of Bierce's closest friends.
5. “The Intellectual Biography of Edwin Markham.” This manuscript, ostensibly written by Florence Hamilton, Markham's secretary and mistress, is almost wholly by the poet himself Three copies exist: one is in the Hamilton Collection of the Library of Congress; two are in the Markham Archives. The latter two have careless, unusable pagination.
6. Interview between Jean Hazen Hale and Virgil Markham, the poet's son, June 7, 1930.
7. “The Intellectual Biography of Edwin Markham.”
8. See Slade, Joseph W., “George Sterling, ‘Prophet of the Suns,’” The Markham Review, 1 (05, 1968), 8–14.Google Scholar
9. Bierce, Ambrose to Sterling, George, 11 1, 1909Google Scholar, in The Letters of Ambrose Bierce, ed. Pope, Bertha Clark (San Francisco: Book Club of California, 1922), p. 157.Google Scholar
10. See O'Connor, Richard, Ambrose Bierce: A Biography (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967), p. 101.Google Scholar
11. Gitnander, M. E., Ambrose Bierce (New York: Twayne, 1971), p. 54.Google Scholar
12. Goldstein, , “Edwin Markham, Ambrose Bierce, and The Man With a Hoe,” p. 167. p. 167.Google Scholar
13. Markham, Charles Edwin to Stedman, Edmund Clarence, 03 15, 1898, Columbia University Library.Google Scholar
14. McWilliams, Carey, Ambrose Bierce: A Biography (New York: Boni, 1929), p. 255.Google Scholar
15. Interview between Jean Hazen Hale and Virgil Markham.
16. Stedman's two letters can be found in Stedman, Laura and Gould, George M., Life and Letters of Edmund Clarence Stedman (New York: Houghton, 1910), II, 256–59.Google Scholar
17. The allusions are to Markham's lines in “The Man With the Hoe”:
Who made him dead to rapture and despair,
A thing that grieves not and that never hopes,
Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox?
Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw?
Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow?
18. Examples are several, all appearing in the San Francisco Examiner: “Prattle” (February 12, 1899)Google Scholar; “More About the Man With the Hoe, Some Strolling Comments on Mr. Markham's Famous Poem” (06 4, 1899)Google Scholar; “The Passing Show” (August 6 and 20, September 3, and November 19 and 26, 1899).
19. Markham, Anna Catherine to Markham, Edwin, 08 20, 1899.Google Scholar
20. Bierce, Ambrose to Sterling, George, 05 9, 1901Google Scholar, Letters, p. 46.Google Scholar
21. Bierce, to Sterling, , 12 16, 1901Google Scholar, Letters, p. 49.Google Scholar
22. London, Jack to Markham, Edwin, 09 5, 1903Google Scholar. Reproduced in The Markham Review, 1 (05, 1968) 12.Google Scholar
23. Bierce, to Sterling, , 09 12, 1903Google Scholar, Letters, p. 73.Google Scholar
24. Sterling, George, “The Shadow-Maker,” The American Mercury, 6 (09, 1925), 11.Google Scholar
25. Bierce, to Sterling, , 05 16, 1905Google Scholar, Letters, p. 109.Google Scholar
26. Bierce, to Sterling, , 05 6, 1906Google Scholar, Letters, p. 119.Google Scholar
27. Markham, Edwin to Sterling, George, 08 2 and 9, 1911, Stanford University Library.Google Scholar
28. Harding, Ruth Guthrie, “Mr. Boythom-Bierce,” The Bookman, 61 (08, 1925), 641.Google Scholar
29. Ibid.