SOURCE: Garland, Hamlin. “Real Conversations—IV: A Dialogue Between James Whitcomb Riley and Hamlin Garland.” McClure's Magazine 2, no. 3 (February 1894): 219-34.

In the following interview, local color writer Garland discusses Riley's work with the poet and gives a vivid sense of the performative elements of both Riley's poetry and his artistic persona.

Riley's country, like most of the State of Indiana, has been won from the original forest by incredible toil. Three generations of men have laid their bones beneath the soil that now blooms into gold and lavender harvests of wheat and corn.

The traveller to-day can read this record of struggle in the fringes of mighty elms and oaks and sycamores which form the grim background of every pleasant stretch of stubble or corn land.

Greenfield, lying twenty miles east of Indianapolis, is to-day an agricultural town, but in the days when Whitcomb Riley lived here it...