Morley, Christopher Darlington, , Pennsylvania 1890 1957 Male Author Editor Novelist Writer writer and editor, was born in Haverford, Pa. , the son of Frank Morley and Lilian Bird, both of English birth.
Taught to read by his mother, Christopher wrote his first story, "The Story of a Woodcutter, " at the age of seven or eight.
Frank Morley, a distinguished English mathematician, had been invited to teach at Haverford College in 1887.
In 1900 the family moved to Baltimore, where Frank Morley became professor of mathematics at the Johns Hopkins University.
Christopher attended the Marston and Jefferson schools in Baltimore and spent much time in the Enoch Pratt Library.
After graduating in 1910, he was awarded a Rhodes scholarship.
In 1906 he returned to Haverford College as an undergraduate.
There he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.
Many of his pieces for the Haverfordian were later published in Hostages to Fortune (1925).
At first he worked for Doubleday, Page and Company, where he became close friends with Frank Nelson Doubleday.
In Philadelphia he published Shandygaff (1918), the first of his thirteen collections of essays; Songs for a Little House (1917), a collection of verse; the novel Parnassus on Wheels (1917); The Haunted Bookshop (1919), another novel; and five other volumes, culminating in Travels in Philadelphia (1920), which describes his wanderings about the city just before his return to New York.
By 1927 he had reached the point in his career when Doubleday felt confident enough to publish the twelve-volume Haverford Collected Edition of his works.
His enthusiasms multiplied: he promoted the works of little-known authors, among them William McFee, Joseph Conrad, Elinor Wylie, Sherwood Anderson, and dozens of others; he discovered Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and became a Sherlock Holmes fan, founding the Baker Street Irregulars in 1934; he ventured into play production in 1928 and again in 1940; and he lectured widely across the country and beyond.
By 1931, when he published his fictionalized autobiography, John Mistletoe, he was perhaps the most widely known professional man of letters in the United States.
Unfortunately the book's popularity and some of the sensational incidents in it and reactions to it have tended to obscure its merits, to the detriment of Morley's literary reputation.
In 1951 Morley suffered a massive stroke, the first of three which largely incapacitated him during the last six years of his life.
Nevertheless, he continued his activities on a reduced scale, traveling, continuing as a judge for the Book-of-the-Month Club until 1954, and writing occasional essays for the Saturday Review.
Morley's literary reputation has suffered since his death.
A collection of his prefaces was published in 1970, and the Christopher Morley Knothole Association meets regularly.
But he has received little critical attention.
Nevertheless, he wrote well and his occasional experiments in writing remain interesting.
His works are still readable, but his lifelong concern with literary promotion largely died with him.
[Important collections of Morley's papers are held by the University of Texas Library and the Haverford College Library.
On his life and work, see Mark I. Wallach and Jon Bracker, Christopher Morley (1976), and Helen McK.
Oakley, Three Hours For Lunch (1976).
Morley is mentioned in several memoirs by others in the Oral History Collection of Columbia University. ]
At New College, Oxford, Morley read history for three years and published The Eighth Sin (1912), a collection of verse dedicated to Helen Booth Fairchild, an American whom he had met in England and married on June 3, 1914.
They had four children.
