He was born in the little country town of Greenfield, twenty miles east of Indianapolis. Like Bret Harte and Mark Twain, Riley had only a common school education. He became a sign painter, and traveled widely, first painting advertisements for patent medicines and then for the leading business firms in the various towns he visited. After this, he did work on newspapers and became a traveling lecturer, and reader of his own poems.
Much of his poetry charms us with its presentation of rural life. In The Old Swimmin'-Hole and 'Leven More Poems (1883), it is a delight to accompany him
"When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the shock,"
or when
"The summer winds is sniffin' round the bloomin' locus' trees,
And the clover in the pastur' is a big day fer the bees,"
or again, in Neighborly Poems (1891), as he listens to The First Bluebird singing with
"A breezy, treesy, beesy hum,
Too sweet fer anything!"
We welcome him as the champion of a new democratic flower. In his poem, The Clover, he says:—
"But what is the lily and all of the rest
Of the flowers, to a man with a hart in his brest
That was dipped brimmin' full of the honey and dew
Of the sweet clover-blossoms his babyhood knew?"
Like Eugene Field, Riley loved children. His Rhymes of Childhood (1890) contains such favorites as The Raggedy Man, Our Hired Girl, Little Orphant Annie, with its bewitching warning about the "Gobble-uns," and the pathetic Little Mahala Ashcraft.