FIELD, EUGENE (1350-95). An American poet and journalist, horn in Saint Louis, Mo. During several years of his childhood he lived in Massachusetts and Vermont, and, though he com pleted his collegiate education in AIissouri, he showed in his work traces of New England and Western elements which co-existed rather than blended in his nature. At twenty-three he began newspaper work, and ten years afterwards he be came associated with the Chicago Daily News, with which he was for twelve years identified through his column "Sharps and Flats." Far the largest part of his literary production first. ap peared here. It is of varied manner and quality, prose and verse, detached paragraphs and con tinued narratives, by turns qua hit, grotesque, delicate, Rabelaisian, farcical, and pathetic. lie seemed to have equal sympathy with the wild life of the prairie and with classic culture, for irresponsible Bohemian life and quiet domestic felicities. Ile is probably most widely known
as a poet of childhood, but most achnired as a scholarly humorist, Ills first publication, The Denise'. Tribune Primer (1882), is one of the eberished rarities of the hook collector. Cul ture's Gorden (1337) contains (lever skits at the pretense of culture. A Little Book of Western Verse (I889) and A Little Book of Profitable Tales (1859) are characteristic of his best orig inal literary achievement. Echoes from a Sabine Farm ( IS95) show bow fully be had absorbed the spirit of the Roman Horace. The Lore Af fairs of a Biblionianiae contains his most delicate ly humorons essays: With Trumpet and Drum (1892), his best verses for children. The post humously published The House (1896), and tquirps and Flats (2 vols., 1900), add nothing to his reputation. Consult Thompson, Eugene Field, Mud!! in heredity and Contradictions (2 vols., New York, 1901).