The American poet Edwin Markham was born in Oregon in 1852. At the turn of the twentieth century, with his wife Catherine Anna Murphy and their infant son Virgil, he moved East, settling first in Brooklyn, and then on Staten Island, N.Y. in 1901, where he made his home until he died in 1940. Markham’s son Virgil, a Wagner College English professor and department chair, donated his father’s personal library of 15,000 volumes to the Horrmann Library, Wagner College, on Staten Island. While all subjects are represented in this selection of 214 objects, the strengths of the collection are in literature, philosophy, religion and the social sciences. He also gave to the college Markham’s personal papers, including many manuscript letters from well-known literary and political figures of the early twentieth century. Among his correspondents were Franklin D. Roosevelt, Ambrose Bierce, Jack London, Carl Sandburg and Amy Lowell.
