According to Glenn Blalock, Ben King was born on March 17, 1857 in St. Joseph, Michigan, married Aseneth Belle Latham, of St. Joseph, on November 27, 1883, in Chicago, and had two sons by her. King belonged to the Chicago Press Club and to the Whitechapel Club, which attracted authors and journalists. King published verse in newspapers and journals like The Century, sometimes under the pseudonym Bow Hackley. King died on tour, April 8, 1894, in Bowling Green, Kentucky, after a public reading the previous night before, and two days later was buried in St. Joseph. It was friends from the Press Club who published Ben King's Verse in 1894, a collection reprinted many times, because King's work was popular. (Glenn Blalock, "Ben[jamin] [Franklin] King 1857-1894," Whitman's & Dickinson's Contemporaries: An Anthology of their Verse, ed. Robert Bain [Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996]: 455. PS 607 W455 1996 Robarts Library.)