Alexander Humphreys Woollcott

Background

In his summers at home he enjoyed a rich intellectual life which included music, art, and reading aloud by his father, particularly from the novels of Dickens and Thackeray.

Education

For six years (1889 - 95) the family lived in Kansas City, Mo. , where Walter Woollcott was secretary of the local Light & Coke Company, but Aleck grew up chiefly at the "Phalanstery" and in Philadelphia, where he was sent to finish grammar school and to attend the Central High School, boarding with local families.

In 1905, helped by a scholarship and a loan of $3, 000 from Humphreys, he entered Hamilton College at Clinton, N. Y. , where he found an outlet for his talents and capitalized on his idiosyncrasies.

The humanistic curriculum broadened both his mind and his knowledge, and the college became his spiritual home, to which he remained forever loyal.

Before he graduated, Ph. B. , in 1909, he had edited the college literary magazine, won election to Phi Beta Kappa, founded a dramatic club, and formed several lifelong friendships.

Armed with a diploma, Woollcott set off for New York City determined to work for a newspaper.

Career

In midsummer he came down with a severe attack of mumps, which permanently reduced his sexual powers.

He won a job on the Times in September.

His new salary of $60 a week gave him a taste of affluence, but the real wealth lay in the theatrical world for which he had had a passion since childhood and to which he now had entree.

In the spring of 1915, when the Shubert brothers objected to his unfavorable review of one of their productions and barred him from their theatres, the Times fought back and Woollcott became a celebrity; his column doubled in length and his salary jumped to $100 a week.

Returning from France in the summer of 1919, he resumed his place on the Times.

His vitality was enormous.

He reviewed plays, wrote his column, ground out magazine pieces, corresponded widely, made and broke reputations.

His biting wit at the Hotel Algonquin Round Table helped win that luncheon gathering its name as the "Vicious Circle. "

He also frequented the "Thanatopsis Literary and Inside Straight Club" (so christened by Franklin P. Adams), a weekly poker game limited chiefly to the male members of the Round Table.

In the summer of 1924, with half a dozen friends, he established an island retreat at Lake Bomoseen, Vt.

He ruled the place autocratically and eventually came to spend the greater part of his time there.

When the Herald merged with the Tribune, Woollcott briefly wrote for the New York Sun, but, disliking the anticlimax of an evening paper, he signed a three-year contract to begin in August 1925 with the World.

Here he joined Franklin P. Adams, Heywood Broun [Supp.

2], Laurence Stallings, friends from his days on Stars and Stripes, and other brilliant journalists who made this New York's most influential newspaper.

When his contract with the World neared its end, Woollcott turned to free-lance writing for the leading magazines.

He began a column for the New Yorker, "Shouts and Murmurs, " in February 1929.

That September he made his radio debut on station WOR of Newark.

He switched in 1930 to the Columbia Broadcasting System and in 1937 became known to millions from coast to coast as "The Town Crier. "

He was less successful at writing plays.

The Channel Road, an adaptation of a story by De Maupassant on which he collaborated with George S. Kaufman in 1929, closed after fifty performances.

Four years later a mystery play called The Dark Tower fared no better.

In two S. N. Behrman plays, Brief Moment (1931) and Wine of Choice (1938), he played roles obviously modeled on himself.

Fat, self-indulgent, hardworking, and capricious, Woollcott suffered a heart attack in April 1940.

In the fall of 1941 a British warship took him to London, where he broadcast over the BBC to promote understanding between the two English-speaking nations.

He planned new broadcasts, but a heart attack canceled them.

His ashes were buried in the cemetery of Hamilton College.

As a critic Woollcott became a national figure, yet his critical standards were lax, subjective, and arbitrary.

Given to romantic sentimentality, he often praised the ordinary.

A gifted phrase-maker, he could also damn with a phrase.

Always eager to dominate an occasion or a scene, he cultivated idiosyncrasies and never hesitated to strike an air or a pose.

He trampled on friendship for the sake of celebrity.

His writing was like his character, more manner than substance.

But he helped make dramatic criticism a vital element in the American theatre, and his urbanity struck a note of style that was widely emulated.

[Woollcott's books are chiefly collections of his articles and reviews, of which the most successful was While Rome Burns (1934).

Less satisfactory is Edwin P. Hoyt, Alexander Woollcott (1968), which attempts to offset some of the uncomplimentary statements and implications of the Adams biography.

See also The Letters of Alexander Woollcott, ed.

by Joseph Hennessey and Beatrice Kaufman (1944); and Margaret Case Harriman, The Vicious Circle (1951). ]

Politics

When in their play The Man Who Came to Dinner (1939) his friends George Kaufman and Moss Hart portrayed a caricature of an acidulous critic, Woollcott gave his blessing and toured triumphantly in the part with the Pacific Coast company.

Personality

On social occasions he was a compulsive talker.

Interests

• Music & Bands

  In his flowing cape, opera hat, and cane, he turned heads at first nights.

Connections

Though the communal order had long since lapsed, much of its intellectual, nonconformist spirit still lingered on among the fifty or sixty persons who lived there, most of them related by blood or marriage.

Aleck's father, an Englishman, roamed casually from job to job with indifferent success.

child:

,

Woollcott, Alexander Humphreys, (Jan. 19, 1887 - Jan. 23, 1943), New Jersey 1887 1943 Male Author Critic Radio Commentator Radio Personality author, dramatic critic, and radio commentator, was the fifth and youngest child of Walter and Frances Grey (Bucklin) Woollcott.

Wife:

Humphreys

The boy was named for Alexander Humphreys q.v., a wealthy engineer whose wife was Mrs. Woollcott's closest friend.

Grandfather:

N.

He was born at the "Phalanstery," an eighty-five-room house on a large farm near Red Bank, N. J., the site of a Fourierist community founded in 1843 and presided over by his maternal grandfather, John S. Bucklin.

Friend:

Humphreys