Robert Fuller Murray was born Dec. 26, 1863, in Roxbury, Massachusetts, of John and Emmeline Murray. In 1869 John took his son to Kelso, England, and then to York. He was educated at grammar schools in Ilminster and in Crewkerne. Murray then attended his beloved University of St. Andrews from 1881, succeeding more in English than in classical Greek. Lacking other opportunities, he became a research assistant to Professor John M. D. Meiklejohn in 1886, published poems in popular journals, and took to journalism in Edinburgh briefly in mid-1889. He returned to St. Andrews in 1890, his consumption then pronounced. 1891 brought him two diversions, a brief visit to Egypt, and the publication of The Scarlet Gown, but Murray succumbed, not long afterwards, to the disease in St Andrews. His friend Andrew Lang carried his second volume of poems into print in 1894, the year of his death, and in 1909 the St. Andrews Students' Representative Council subvented a second edition of The Scarlet Gown, as Lang then said, "by piety."

• Murray, Robert Fuller. The Scarlet Gown; being Verses by a St. Andrews Man. 2d edn. Intro. by Andrew Lang. Glasgow: James MacLehose, 1909. LE M9837sc Robarts Library
• --. Robert F. Murray: his Poems. Memoir by Andrew Lang. London: Longmans, Green, 1894. PR 5101 M5A6 1894 Robarts Library