There are worse things to happen in childhood, so if you're kind enough to begin this Denver Lit Tour with us at this recommended first stop, then by all means force your children to lean into your viewfinder for a lovely shot of the statue (sculpted by Mabel Landrum Torrey in 1919) with Washington Park lake - and the Rocky Mountains - in the background.

It doesn't matter that the only connection between Eugene Field (1850-1895) and Washington Park is that he once nearly drowned in it while goofing around with friends. What does matter is that this city - and an entire generation of American parents and children - adored this man and his writings.

Just as nearly every American child today has a Dr. Seuss book read to him or her, Eugene Field's poems for children were equally beloved and best-selling in the first decades of the last century. Beside "Dutch Lullaby," the poem honored by the sculpture, children everywhere once knew "The Sugar Plum Tree," "The Duel" (between the Gingham Dog and the Calico Cat), and "Little Boy Blue."

He wasn't hired for his poetry, though, when the Denver Tribune brought him here in 1881 as managing editor: He was a young, razor-sharp, muckraking newspaperman from St. Louis who, in the two tumultuous years he spent in Denver, turned the city upside down with his habit of skewering self-important gold and silver bullion kings and politicians, making his "Nonpareil" column a daily must-read. When he wasn't torturing the rich and powerful with barbed truth-telling, he was cracking up the Tribune's readership with his joke-filled columns, sometimes in verse, sometimes in prose.

In person, he was a whimsical, self-effacing, highly intelligent prankster who, with little prodding, would, with a charming mix of impudence and impracticality, either stick a firecracker in a holiday turkey baking in the oven or loan money he couldn't really spare to a down-and-out family.

In short, he generated a huge amount of good karma (and fun karma, if there is such a thing). His best and most famous fit of glorious misbehavior happened on April 12, 1882, when he decided, in a Fieldsian way, that Oscar Wilde, then touring America on a puffed-up, bad-boy-of-literature lecture tour, needed a little puncturing.

With the city's official reception committee under the impression that Wilde was due to arrive at Union Station that morning, Field knew from friends on the railroad that Wilde's train would be delayed by hours. Immediately shifting into trickster mode, Field asked his cronies to meet "Wilde" on the next train.

Field changed into a set of aesthetically appropriate Wildean clothes, from hat to wig to gloves, drove to the eastern city limits to catch an undelayed, incoming train, and for the course of that entire morning, he impersonated Wilde to the completely duped downtown population of Denver, greeting the crowd from the platform at the station, and continuing the dramatic parade with regal hand-waves from a carriage through city streets until he came clean and called a halt to the joke in front of the Denver Tribune offices.

Accordingly, poor Oscar Wilde had a miserable turnout at the station for his actual arrival, which was, of course, the general idea all along.

When he wasn't impersonating 19th-century celebrities, he was busy inhabiting the body of a tall, lanky man in a bowler hat who proudly crowed that he was "inclined to baldness," adding that, "I...have shocking taste in dress, but I like to have well-dressed people about me."

An insomniac, he gloried in bad habits that endeared him to his friends and readers, from being an early junk food aficionado (in 1882 "junk food" seems to have been just "pies") to refusing to admit that he loved children (in spite of the fact that he and his wife eventually raised eight of them).

A self-confessed bibliomaniac who collected thousands of books over the years (how appropriate that the Denver Public Library branch on South University Boulevard is named after him!), Field claimed to do his best reading and writing while laying flat on his bed.

He was a whimsical, funny man who charmed his friends and colleagues with jokes filled - often simultaneously - with nonsense and compassion. He had a special love of animals, writing once that, "If I could have my way, I should make the abuse of horses, dogs and cattle a penal offense; I should abolish all dog-laws and dog-catchers, and I would punish severely every body who caught and caged birds."

In Denver, he lived in a small, four-room house at 315 West Colfax Avenue, right across the street from the U.S. Mint. By the late 1920s the house was on the verge of being condemned when a certain unsinkable Denver matron named Margaret Tobin Brown (Molly Brown - yes, that one) bought the house on the condition that the city make a memorial of it in Field's name. In 1930, it was dedicated as a branch library at its current site in Washington Park, though Park People, a nonprofit group, have used and maintained the structure since the 1970s.