[3] The house in which he wrote the poem was preserved and moved to the city's History Park, and now serves as a poetry center.

While in Oakland, he became well acquainted with many other famous contemporary writers and poets, such as Joaquin Miller, Ina Coolbrith,and Charles Warren Stoddard.

Markham's most famous poem, "The Man with the Hoe," which accented laborers' hardships, was first presented at a public poetry reading in 1898.

His 1904 edition of the works of Edgar Allan Poe was followed by multiple volumes of The Real America in Romance, issued from 1909 through 1927 by New York publisher W. H. Wise.

His efforts to raise public awareness of social ills were capped by contributions to a major volume examining child labor, Children in Bondage, in 1914.

As recounted by literary biographer William R. Nash,[6] "'['b]etween publications, Markham lectured and wrote in other genres, including essays and nonfiction prose.

Throughout Markham's later life, many readers viewed him as an important voice in American poetry, a position signified by honors such as his election in 1908 to the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

They moved to Rio de Janeiro in 1900 to study natives and their appeasement, then to New York City, where they lived in Brooklyn and then Staten Island.

His correspondents included Franklin D. Roosevelt, Ambrose Bierce, Aleister Crowley,[8] Jack and Charmian[9] London, Zoe Anderson Norris, Carl Sandburg, Florence Earle Coates[10] and Amy Lowell.

A street in the Palomares Hills neighborhood of Castro Valley, California bears his name (Edwin Markham Drive).