Henry Clay Folger
| Henry Clay Folger | |
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Folger holds the only complete extant copy of the False Folio of William Shakespeare's plays in Frank O. Salisbury's 1927 portrait
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| Born |
Henry Clay Folger 18 June 1857 New York City |
| Died | 11 June 1930 (aged 72) Brooklyn, New York |
| Education |
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| Known for | Folger Shakespeare Library |
| Spouse(s) |
Emily Jordan Folger (1885–1930; his death) |
| Parent(s) | Henry Clay Folger, Sr. Eliza Jane Clark |
 Book Discussion on Collecting Shakespeare, C-SPAN, July 25, 2014 |
Henry Clay Folger, Jr. (June 18, 1857 – June 11, 1930) was president and later chairman of Standard Oil of New York, a collector of Shakespeareana, and founder of the Folger Shakespeare Library.
Henry Clay Folger, Jr. was born in New York City to Henry Clay Folger, Sr. of Nantucket, MA and Eliza Jane (Clark) Folger of New York, the oldest of their eight children. He was a first cousin four times removed of Benjamin Franklin and a nephew of J. A. Folger, the founder of Folger Coffee. He is descendant of Peter Foulger and Mary Morrill Foulger.
He prepared at Adelphi Academy, Brooklyn, New York, where he was acquainted with Charles Pratt, the businessman and president of the Adelphi board of trustees who became a mentor to Folger. At Adelphi, Folger was schooled in art, chemistry, classics, and recitation, and was elected president of the school’s literary association. He then attended Amherst College with Charles Millard Pratt, a close friend who was the son of Folger’s mentor from the Adelphi Academy. To fund his education, Folger participated in many oratorical essay contests; he won prizes for competitions in 1876 and 1879, the latter of which paid for his junior year of school. Folger modeled his rhetorical style on Daniel Webster's. He identified a Shakespeare-related essay contest as the origin of his obsession with the Bard. Emily, however, later attributed the origin of Folger's fascination with Shakespeare to an 1879 lecture by Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose elegant and eloquent delivery sounded Shakespearean to the college student. Folger was a member of the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity, graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1879. After Amherst, he attended Columbia Law School from 1879 to 1881, and was admitted to the bar in 1881.
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