Edwin Markham was born in Oregon City, Oregon, April 23, 1852, the youngest son of pioneer parents. His father died before he had reached his fifth year and in 1857 he was taken by his mother to a wild valley in the Suisun Hills in central California. Here he grew to young manhood; farming, broncho-riding, laboring on a cattle ranch, educating himself in the primitive country schools and supplementing his studies with whatever books he could procure. At eighteen he determined to be a teacher and entered the State Normal School at San Jose. After some years he became superintendent and principal of various schools in that locality.

Since childhood, Markham had been writing verses of no extraordinary merit, one of his earliest pieces being a typically Bryonic echo (A Dream of Chaos) full of the high-sounding fustian of the period. Several years before he uttered his famous challenge, Markham was writing poems of protest, insurrectionary in theme but conventional in effect. Suddenly, in 1899, a new force surged through him; a sense of outrage at the inequality of human struggle voiced itself in the sweeping and sonorous poem, “The Man with the Hoe.” (See Preface.) Inspired by Millet’s painting, Markham made the bowed, broken French peasant a symbol of the poverty-stricken toiler in all lands—his was a protest not against labor but the drudgery, the soul-destroying exploitation of labor. “The Yeoman is the landed and well-to-do farmer,” says Markham, “you need shed no tears for him. But here in the Millet picture is his opposite—the Hoeman; the landless, the soul-blighted workman of the world, the dumb creature that has no time to rest, no time to think, no time for the hopes that make us men.” ... “The Man with the Hoe,” with its demand for a keener sense of social responsibility, was not wholly cast in the key of challenge. It looked to a more expansive future when “all workers will think and all thinkers will work”; it answered Music’s great trio of B.’s (Bach, Beethoven, Brahms) with the need of a greater three: “Bread, Beauty and Brotherhood.”

The success of the poem upon its appearance in the San Francisco Examiner (January 15, 1899) was instantaneous and universal. The lines appeared in every part of the globe; it was quoted and copied in every walk of life, in the literary world, the leisure world, the labor world. The same year of its publication, it was incorporated in Markham’s first volume The Man with the Hoe, and Other Poems (1899). Two years later, his almost as well known poem was published. The same passion that fired Markham to champion the great common workers equipped him to write fittingly of the Great Commoner in Lincoln, and Other Poems (1901). His later volumes are dignified and melodious but scarcely remarkable. Never reaching the heights of his two early classics, there are, nevertheless, many moments of a related nobility in The Shoes of Happiness (1914) and The Gates of Paradise (1920).

Markham came East in 1901, his home being on Staten Island, New York.