Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Youth of James Whitcomb Riley: Fortune's Way With the Poet From Infancy to Manhood
When Cromwell sat to Sir Peter Leley, he said, I desire you will use all your skill to paint my picture truly like me, and not ?atter me at all; but remark all those roughnesses, pimples, warts, and everything as you see me.
This famous injunction Riley quoted to a reporter who sought his opinion on biography. The poet had read it, for the first time, when a youth, in the preface to a rare and much loved set of old books entitled British Painters and Sculptors. To a writer who came to him for a sketch of his life, he said, Don't take sides with con?icting opinions about me; don't strive to write me up or down; tell the facts. He went on to talk of Boswell. They have called him a conceited fool, said be, but he was of as much benefit to literature as Johnson himself. He put things down as they were, and for once we have the charming chronicle of a life without the weakness of apology.
To the author of this volume, the poet said: There is a Chemistry in Nature that is making the worst good and the best better. To this end a biographer may give scars the treatment distance gives them in the landscape; he may soften or spiritualize them - but never ignore them. In a word, the golden rule was this: speak the truth in love.
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