When he was sixteen years old, Walter de la Mare established a magazine at the St. Paul's Cathedral Choir School in London. The Chorister's Review ran nine issues. The following year he became a clerk with the Anglo-American branch of the Standard Oil Company, a job he held for eighteen years, until a government grant and pension permitted him to devote himself completely to writing. He published more than eighty books of poetry and fiction. Many of his poems were nominally written for children.
