In April 1887, Field wrote, "While Chicago is humping herself in the interests of literature, art and the sciences, vain old Boston is frivoling away her precious time in an attempted renaissance of the cod fisheries."

Also that year, Chicago's National League baseball club sold future baseball Hall of Famer Mike "King" Kelly to Boston, and coincidentally soon after, famous Boston poet and diplomat James Russell Lowell made a speaking tour of Chicago.

Four months later, upon Kelly's first return to Chicago as a player for Boston, Field would speak to "Col. Samuel J. Bosbyshell, the Prairie avenue millionaire."

If it hadn't been for [Chicago humorist] Frank Lincoln, with his imitations and funny stories, the dinner would have been a stupid affair.

Nor did he confine his conversation to base-ball topics; he is deeply versed in turf lore, and he talked most entertainingly of the prominent race horses he was acquainted with and of the leading jockeys he has met.

"[6] Field first started publishing poetry in 1879, when his poem "Christmas Treasures" appeared in A Little Book of Western Verse.

[7] Over a dozen volumes of poetry followed and he became well known for his light-hearted poems for children, among the most famous of which are "Wynken, Blynken, and Nod" and "The Duel" (which is perhaps better known as "The Gingham Dog and the Calico Cat").

[11] Slason Thompson's 1901 biography of Field states that he was originally buried in Graceland Cemetery in Chicago,[12] but his son-in-law, Senior Warden of the Church of the Holy Comforter, had him reinterred on March 7, 1926.

[13] Several of his poems were set to music with commercial success by composers such as Isabel Stewart North,[14] Gertrude Ross,[15] and Ella May Dunning Smith.

[19] As a memorial to Field, a statue of the Dream Lady from his poem "Rock-a-by-Lady" was erected in 1922 at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago.

Another statue of Wynken, Blynken and Nod sits in the center of the town square (called "the green" by locals) in Wellsboro, Pa.

A dormitory in the Orchard Hill residential area at the University of Massachusetts Amherst also bears Field's name.

In the 1920s, American drama critic and magazine editor George Jean Nathan recalled it as a popular forbidden work among those coming of age at the turn of the century, along with Fanny Hill and "Green Girls of Paris".