Thomas Augustine Daly was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, May 28, 1871. He attended Villanova College and Fordham University (1889), leaving there at the end of his sophomore year to become a newspaper man. Since 1891 he has been on the staff of various Philadelphia journals, writing reviews, editorials, travel-notes and, most of all, running the columns in which his much-quoted verse originally appeared.

Canzoni (1906) and Carmina (1909) contain the best known of Daly’s varied dialect verse. Although he has written in half a dozen different idioms including “straight” English (vide Songs of Wedlock, 1916), his half-humorous, half-pathetic interpretations of the Irish and Italian immigrants are his forte.

Seldom descending to caricature, Daly exhibits the features and foibles of his characters without exploiting them; even the lightest passages in McAroni Ballads (1919) are done with delicacy and a not too sentimental appreciation.