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.