Background
Francis Welch Crowninshield was born on June 24, 1872 in Paris, France. He was one of three children of Frederic Crowninshield and Helen Suzette (Fairbanks) Crowninshield. The father's American progenitor, Johannes von Kronenscheldt, had anglicized the name upon his emigration from Germany to Salem, Massachussets, in 1670. A more recent ancestor, Benjamin W. Crownin-shield, was secretary of the navy under Presidents Madison and Monroe. Frederic Crowninshield, an artist specializing in watercolors, murals, and stained glass, was studying in Italy at the time of Frank's birth. From 1878 to 1885, with frequent interludes in Europe, the family lived in Boston, where Frederic Crowninshield taught in the museum school of the Museum of Fine Arts.
Education
Frank's early education was mainly in the hands of private tutors. In 1886 the family moved to New York City where Frank studied at Lyon's Academy.
Career
In 1890 he became a clerk in a Putnam's bookstore. His five years (1895 - 1900) as publisher of Dodd, Mead and Co's literary review The Bookman was the first of a succession of positions in the New York periodical world--assistant editor of Metropolitan Magazine (1900 - 1902) and of Munsey's Magazine (1903 - 1907), London literary agent for Munsey's (1908 - 1909), art editor of Century Magazine (1910 - 1913), and finally, in 1914, editor of Dress and Vanity Fair, an undistinguished ten-year-old periodical recently acquired by the dynamic publisher Condé Nast.
Shortening the name, Crowninshield quickly transformed Vanity Fair into a chic and slick reflection of his own sophisticated interests in modern art and literature, the theater, society, and sports--"the things people talk about at parties. "
Coming to Vanity Fair in the year of the Armory Show, Crowninshield for twenty-two years worked to win support and sympathy for the new in all branches of the arts among his select and affluent readership. He regularly published reproductions of the works of contemporary artists--especially French modernists such as Picasso, Matisse, Bonnard, and Rouault--and provided an outlet for young writers including Edna St. Vincent Millay, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Aldous Huxley, John Dos Passos, and Edmund Wilson.
What became known as café society--a mingling of artists and writers with members of the traditional upper crust--was in part his creation.
Inevitably, the Great Depression forced some difficult adjustments upon a man of Frank Crowninshield's outlook. Vanity Fair frequently operated at a loss even in the 1920's, and in the 1930's it faltered badly.
In 1932 Condé Nast undercut Crowninshield's editorial autonomy by appointing two editorial advisors to give the magazine a more serious tone and to solicit a greater number of articles on politics and economics. Four years later, when Nast merged Vanity Fair with Vogue, another of his magazines, Crowninshield became art editor of Vogue and "literary advisor" to Condé Nast Publications, Inc. Many of his paintings and rare books were sold at auction in these years; one such sale, in 1943, netted more than $180, 000.
After a five-week illness following an operation, he died at Roosevelt Hospital, New York, at the age of seventy-five. After services in St. James Protestant Episcopal Church, New York, he was buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachussets.
Views
Quotations:
"My interest in society, at times so pronounced that the word 'snob' comes a little to mind, derives from the fact that I like an immense number of things which society, money, and position bring in their train: painting, tapestries, rare books, smart dresses, dances, gardens, country houses, correct cuisine, and pretty women".
Personality
He himself owned a notable collection of contemporary paintings which he often lent for exhibit. A tall, elegant, and urbane bachelor whose lapel was invariably adorned with a boutonniere, Crowninshield was exceptionally active in Manhattan social life as a toastmaster, party guest, cotillion leader, and after-dinner speaker. Indeed, his contemporary reputation seems to have rested as much on his style as on his journalistic achievements; "He could order a can of sardines, " a friend once said, "and give you the impression it was a distinguished and festive thing to do. " (He never touched alcohol, having, so he said, inadvertently taken the pledge at the age of ten while attending a Boston temperance rally with a female relative. )
