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 DeWolf 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 AlmanacThayer moved to Santa Barbara, California, in 1912 and died there on August 21, 1940.