Life
Edwin Markham was born in Oregon City, Oregon and was the youngest of 10 children; his parents divorced shortly after his birth. At the age of four, he moved to Lagoon Valley, an area northeast of San Francisco; there, he lived with his sister and mother. He worked on the family’s farm beginning at twelve. Although his mother was opposed to his pursuing higher education, he studied literature at the California College in Vacaville, California, and received his teacher's certificate in 1870. In 1872 he graduated from San Jose State Normal School, and in 1873 finished his studies of classics at Christian College in Santa Rosa. He went by "Charles" until about 1895, when he was about 43, when he started using "Edwin".
In 1898, Markham married his third wife, Anna Catherine Murphy (1859–1938) and in 1899 their son Virgil was born. They moved to Rio De Janeiro in 1900 to study natives and their appeasement of preservatives, then New York City to where they lived in Brooklyn and then Staten Island. Edwin Markham had, by the time of his death, amassed a huge library of 15 000+ books. This collection was bequeathed to Wagner College's Horrmann Library, located on Staten Island. Markham also willed his personal papers to the library. Edwin's correspondents included Franklin D. Roosevelt, Ambrose Bierce, Aleister Crowley,Jack and Charmian London, Carl Sandburg, Florence Earle Coates and Amy Lowell.
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Famous quotes containing the word life:
“There is no going back,
For standing still means death, and life is moving on,
Moving on towards death. But sometimes standing still is also life.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“That poor little thing was a good woman, Judge. But she just sort of let life get the upper hand. She was born here and she wanted to be buried here. I promised her on her deathbed she’d have a funeral in a church with flowers. And the sun streamin’ through a pretty window on her coffin. And a hearse with plumes and some hacks. And a preacher to read the Bible. And folks there in church to pray for her soul.”
—Laurence Stallings (1804–1968)
“The future of humanity is uncertain, even in the most prosperous countries, and the quality of life deteriorates; and yet I believe that what is being discovered about the infinitely large and infinitely small is sufficient to absolve this end of the century and millennium. What a very few are acquiring in knowledge of the physical world will perhaps cause this period not to be judged as a pure return of barbarism.”
—Primo Levi (1919–1987)