Background
Frank Gelett Burgess was born on January 30, 1866 in Boston, Massachussets, the son of Thomas Harvey Burgess, a prosperous painting contractor, and Caroline Brooks Burgess.
humorist illustrator novelist playwright poet
Frank Gelett Burgess was born on January 30, 1866 in Boston, Massachussets, the son of Thomas Harvey Burgess, a prosperous painting contractor, and Caroline Brooks Burgess.
He received the B. S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1887. Finding Boston too conventional and austere, he moved to San Francisco shortly after finishing college.
He worked for three years as a draftsman for the Southern Pacific Railroad and in 1891 was appointed an instructor in topographical drawing at the University of California at Berkeley.
In 1894 Gelett Burgess (he rarely used the name Frank) left academia and civil engineering and became associate editor of the Wave, a San Francisco society paper with literary pretensions. He continued to write gossip for the Wave until its demise in 1901.
During the 1890's he also wrote for the weekly magazine Criterion. Burgess hoped to make San Francisco a major literary and artistic center. Believing that the city was too tame and conservative, he and his friends, known as Les Jeunes, founded the Lark in 1895. The Lark was modeled on the Chicago Chap-Book, edited by Harrison Garfield Rhodes, and was part of the "little magazine" vogue of the 1890's. Frank Luther Mott described it as "one of the most charming magazines ever published. "
The Lark was printed on thin, yellow bamboo paper that Burgess had discovered in San Francisco's Chinatown. The magazine's title had a double meaning--not only would it sing at heaven's gate, but it would do so in a frolicsome manner.
Although the magazine had been published "just for a lark" and Burgess, its editor, did not expect to issue a second number, its spirit of sheer foolishness, wit, and good taste attracted a relatively large following.
Burgess wrote a series of goop books to teach children manners. These works included Goops and How to Be Them (1900), Blue Goops and Red (1909), The Goop Directory (1913), and New Goops (1951). While editing the Lark, Burgess started two other magazines: the Phyllida, which featured more serious literary material, and Le Petit Journal des Refusées, which was even zanier than the Lark--it was printed on discontinued wall-paper designs cut into trapezoid-shaped pages.
Although the Lark had a circulation of five thousand, Burgess discontinued its publication in 1897 after twenty-five issues. He wanted the magazine to end while it was still innovative, and he was anxious to move to New York City, where he arrived by August 1897, staying for much of his remaining life. Besieged by editors for verse and drawings, Burgess became a revered figure in Greenwich Village, where he lived for a while.
Among the magazines he contributed to were Companion, American Magazine, Smart Set, Critic, St. Nicholas, and the Masses. He was also an associate editor of Ridgeway's.
In 1949, two years after his wife's death, Burgess moved to Carmel, California, where he lived until his death.
Gelett Burgess wrote more than thirty-five books of fiction and nonfiction, including Are You a Bromide? The Sulphite Theory (1907), The Maxims of Methuselah (1907), Love in a Hurry (1913), War, the Creator (1916), Why Men Hate Women (1927), Look Eleven Years Younger (1937), and Short Words Are Words of Might (1939). He also wrote several plays, one of which was appropriately entitled The Purple Cow. Burgess contributed many words to the English language, including goop, bromide, and blurb, as well as a number of words that failed to catch on and disappeared: "spuzz, " meaning stamina, force, or spice; "gefoojh, " an unnecessary thing; "varm, " the quintessence of sex; and many more. Burgess also founded the San Francisco Boys' Club Association, now the Boys & Girls Clubs of San Francisco, in 1891 and became its first president. The Club was the first of its kind west of the Mississippi River.
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According to Burgess, there were two kinds of goops, independent thinkers called "sulphites" and platitudinous bores known as "bromides. "
Quotations:
The magazine became famous when it published, in its first issue in May 1895, Burgess' quatrain: I never saw a purple cow I never hope to see one; But I can tell you anyhow, I'd rather see than be one. The ditty became the most quoted poem of the 1890's, and from that time on Burgess was known as "the purple cow" man. He was frequently teased because of the poem, and critics refused to take seriously any of his later writings. Burgess came to regret that he had ever written the poem. Ah, yes, I wrote the "Purple Cow. " I'm Sorry, now, I wrote it; But I can tell you Anyhow I'll kill you if you Quote it! In addition to Burgess' nonsense verse, the Lark also contained his first drawings of the boneless and ill-mannered quasi-human figures he named "goops. "
"The goops, they lick their fingers; The goops, they lick their knives. They spill their broth on the table cloth-- They lead disgusting lives. According to Burgess, there were two kinds of goops, independent thinkers called "sulphites" and platitudinous bores known as "bromides. "
Burgess wrote of Matisse's 1907 painting Blue Nude (Souvenir de Biskra) in humorist fashion:
"There were no limits to the audacity and the ugliness of the canvasses. Still-life sketches of round, round apples and yellow, yellow oranges, on square, square tables, seen in impossible perspective; landscapes of squirming trees, with blobs of virgin color gone wrong, fierce greens and coruscating yellows, violent purples, sickening reds and shuddering blues.
But the nudes! They looked like flayed Martians, like pathological charts—hideous old women, patched with gruesome hues, lopsided, with arms like the arms of a Swastika, sprawling on vivid backgrounds, or frozen stiffly upright, glaring through misshapen eyes, with noses or fingers missing. They defied anatomy, physiology, almost geometry itself!"
He was a member of the San Francisco Boys' Club Association.
In 1914 he married Estelle Loomis, a former actress. His wife was also an author and published stories and articles in a number of magazines.
