The same year he abandoned the use of his first name, by which he had been known his entire life, and began using middle name, Edwin. He had two failed marriages when he married Anna Catherine Murphy in 1895, a union that endured until her death in 1938. In his new community, he soon fell in with a semi-bohemian circle of writers and poets that included Joaquin Miller, Donna Coolbrith, Charles Warren Stoddard, and Edmund Clarence Stedman, all important regionalist writers who encouraged his literary efforts. In 1890 he moved to the big city of Oakland where he became a high school principle. He was so well thought of that he was elected Superintendent of Schools six years later. Upon graduation he was able to secure a better position as a public school teacher in El Dorado County. While there, he discovered Universalism, a denomination where the good news of universal salvation echoed his own emerging outlook. He earned enough money to enroll in a more established school, Christian College in Santa Rosa, California from which he graduated in 1873. He was soon eking out a living as a small town school master. It was a hard life which left Markam a champion of the exploited and a skeptic of harsh orthodox Christianity.ĭespite his mother’s opposition Markam enrolled in a hard scrabble little college in at Vacaville, California. At the age of 12 his schooling ended and he worked on the family ranch or hired out as a laborer. He was a gifted and eager student, but his mother vehemently opposed his attempts to get an education both because she feared that “book learning” would lead her son into sin and because she needed him for support. The boy was sporadically educated at rural schools. His mother and her younger children relocated to a small ranch in Lagoon Valley, California northwest of San Francisco. His father abandoned the family and his devoutly Christian mother divorced him when Markam was young. But due to shifting styles and tastes he is today an obscure figure.Ĭharles Edwin Markam was born the youngest of 10 children to a farm family near Oregon City, Oregon in 1853. Although more than a generation older, he was often classed with Carl Sandburg and Vachel Lindsey as one of the poets of the people. Regular readers of his blog, Heretic, Rebel, a Thing to Flout, may recall that it gets its name from a short four line poem named Outwittedby Edwin Markham:įrom the publication of his poem The Man With the Hoe inspired by a painting by Jean-François Millet in 1898 through the early decades of the 20 th Century, Markham was one of the most widely read and admired of American poets.
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