Famous Single Poems
ship had appeared, and some of them had even tried to compel Mr. Hopper to pay a royalty for the privilege of reciting it. The basis of most of these claims was exceedingly fantastic, but one man, at least, succeeded in building an elaborate structure of evidence in support of his own contention, and to this day there is no little confusion in the public mind as to when and by whom the poem was written.
The first person to whom it was ascribed with some appearance of authority was Joseph Quinlan Murphy. In 1902 Frederic Lawrence Knowles edited an anthology called A Treasury of Humorous Poetry, and included an early version of "Casey at the Bat," crediting it to Mr. Murphy. The only information about him was given in the index of authors, where it was stated that he died in 1902. By the time anybody thought to question this, Mr. Knowles himself was dead, and his publishers could say nothing more than that he had always been very careful to trace the authorship of anything of which he was in doubt.
Richter's History and Records of Baseball states, in a chapter on "Writers on Baseball," that Joseph Murphy was at one time on the staff of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, but the editor of that paper writes that "the oldest members of our editorial staff do not recall any person named
110
