Auteur: Ernest Lawrence Thayer

Ernest Lawrence Thayer was a newspaper columnist and poet. He was born August 14, 1863, in Lawrence, Massachusetts and graduated with a BA in philosophy from Harvard University in 1885. While at Harvard, Thayer was a member of the Hasty Pudding Club edited the Harvard Lampoon and became friends with future mega-publisher William Randolph Hearst.After they graduated, Hearst hired Thayer to write a humorous column for one of his newspapers, the San Francisco Examiner. On June 3, 1883, Thayer wrote his last column for the Examiner, publishing the poem « Casey at the Bat,  » under the pen name Phin. Years later, the poem would become immensely popular after the actor William De Wolf Hopper began performing it as a part of his theatrical and radio performances. It would go on to become « the single most famous baseball poem ever written » according to the Baseball Almanac Thayer moved to Santa Barbara, California, in 1912 and died there on August 21, 1940.