Henry Clay Folger

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. Early life Henry Clay Folger Jr. was born in New York City to Henry Clay Folger Sr. of Nantucket, Massachusetts, and Eliza Jane (Clark) Folger of New York, the eldest of their eight children. He was a first cousin six times removed of Benjamin Franklin and a nephew of J. A. Folger, the founder of Folger Coffee. He descended from Peter Foulger (the maternal grandfather of Benjamin Franklin) and Mary Morrill Foulger. He graduated from Adelphi Academy, in Brooklyn, New York, where Charles Pratt, the businessman and president of Adelphi's board of trustees, became a mentor to him. 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 and son of Folger's mentor at Adelphi. To fund his education, Folger competed in many oratorical essay contests, winning prizes in 1876 and again in 1879, 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. His wife, Emily, however, would later attribute Folger's initial fascination with Shakespeare to an 1879 lecture by Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose eloquent delivery sounded Shakespearean to the college student. At Amherst, Folger was a member of the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity, graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1879. Following graduation, he attended Columbia Law School from 1879 to 1881, gaining admittance to the bar in 1881.