Field

Eugene, an American journalist and author. Born at St. Louis September 3, 1850. He spent a year as a student in Williams College, a second year at Knox College, and a third year in Columbia Missouri College. A friend who recalls his sophomore year at Knox describes him as careless of dress and fond of pranks, long hair, poetry, old books, and a corncob pipe. After six months in Europe, 1872, Field served successively as a reporter, editor, and managing editor on several papers in St. Joseph, St. Louis, Kansas City, and Denver. In 1883 he came to Chicago as a free lance on the News, which was later known as the Record. In 1889 he made a second trip to Europe. He died in Chicago November 4, 1895. As a newspaper writer he had a keen sense of the ludicrous and laid on unsparingly wherever he suspected corruption or hypocrisy.

Field was fond of practical jokes. In 1874, while touring in Missouri to report the political meetings addressed by Carl Schurz, he was requested, in the absence of the presiding officer, to introduce Mr. Schurz, which he proceeded to do in a chest tone as follows:

Ladies and Chentlemens: I have such a sereve cold dot I cannot make me a speedg tonight, but I haf die bleasure of to introduce to you my prilliant young chournalistic gompanion, Mr. Eucheene Fielt, who will spheak in my blace.

Quite a circle of booklovers were apt to gather in the rare book corner of McClurg's bookstore, especially upon the receipt of a lot of rarities from Europe. Field was the life of the circle, and took to publishing the sayings of "The Saints and Sinners Club," as he called them in his "Sharps and Flats" column of the News. As the years went by and Field began to gather reputation as a writer of verse, he was fond of surprising these cherished friends with a new poem. On New Year's Eve, 1891, he sent each member of the circle an invitation to meet in The Saints and Sinners' corner to watch the old year out. At the critical moment when "church yards yawn," he unexpectedly turned off the gas, leaving the store in deepest darkness; then, lighting a feeble candle, he proceeded to read his little audience an inimitable booklover's poem, "Dibdin's Ghost," newly written for the occasion. No one-volume edition of Field's poems is to be had. A Little Book of Western Verse, A Little Book of Profitable Tales, and A Second Book of Verse, probably rank in the order named. Little Boy Blue is perhaps his most popular poem, though the volumes named contain many lullabies and poems that appeal to all lovers of wife, home, and children.

Talent, education, friends, books, and the untrammeled training of newspaper life combined to make Eugene Field a successful man of letters.

An American of Americans, much of his verse was devoted to the celebration of what we may call the minor joys which go to make social happiness in the life he lived with so frank and rounded a completion. . . . He takes his America with just the same heartiness as his nonsense land; . . . We find the same honest resolve to accept the rules and to play out the game accordingly; the same conviction, that the game is in itself a good one, well worth the playing.--Kenneth Grahame.

Eugene Field will always be remembered as the poet of child-life.

Eugene Field won the hearts of "grown-ups" as well as children with his humorous, tender, dainty, and fantastic little songs.--J. W. Abernethy.