Background
He was born on November 26, 1889 in New Haven, Connecticut, United States, the son of Charles Richard Phillips and Charlotte Ann Stannard Johnson. His father, industrious but poor, worked at odd jobs.
He was born on November 26, 1889 in New Haven, Connecticut, United States, the son of Charles Richard Phillips and Charlotte Ann Stannard Johnson. His father, industrious but poor, worked at odd jobs.
Phillips was educated in the local public schools but had no opportunity to go to college.
In his adolescent years Phillips had various odd jobs.
According to John Chamberlain, he got his start in journalism in 1906. While driving a grocery wagon (a job he disliked intensely), he passed the office of the New Haven Register. Impulsively he stopped, tied the horse to a hitching post, and applied for a job as a reporter. The Register needed a cub reporter, so he started work immediately. Phillips' rise in the world of New Haven journalism was spectacular. By 1912 he was managing editor of the Register. At this time, as he described it, his chief ambition was to become a cartoonist. He subsequently illustrated several of his Private Purkey books.
He joined the staff of the New York Tribune in 1917. Fired from the Tribune, Phillips wandered into a job at the New York Globe as a copy boy for $40 a week, much less than he had earned in New Haven. He was unwilling to accept that situation for long, so when, one afternoon, he realized that the Globe had no columnist, he wrote a column satirizing the day's news and left it on the city editor's desk. Next day the piece appeared on the editorial page, and he was asked to write a daily column. After several months of writing a column as a side to his regular work, he became a full-fledged columnist.
By the time the Globe was sold to the New York Sun in 1923, Phillips was a star columnist. The New York World lured him away, but an injunction forced him to return to the Sun. He remained with the paper until it was absorbed by the New York World Telegram in 1950.
During the period before World War II, his books met with some commercial and critical success, but they were quickly forgotten. After the war Phillips continued to write columns for the Sun and then for the Bell-McClure Syndicate.
Phillips was recuperating from a broken hip when he died in Milford, Connecticut. His last column was written the day before his death.
Harry Irving Phillips was well-known as the full-fledged, star columnist of the New York Globe. He also was the author of the famous column, "Sun Dial", it became a mainstay of the Sun. Besides, he was the author of popular radio sketches, skits for Broadway musicals and reviews, and several books: The Globe Trotter, The Foolish Question Book, Calvin Coolidge. He received awards from the Catholic Institute of the Press (1953) and the Valley Forge Association.
He was a staunch Republican.
Before Pearl Harbor, Private Purkey was not very enthusiastic about the war situation, but after Pearl Harbor all that changed. Purkey could hardly control his eagerness to get at the enemy, especially the Japanese.
An admitted hater of New York City and what he considered New Yorkers represented in American life, he labeled the New Deal a "New York abomination, " filled with "reformers, agitators and fix-it-alls" - all bad words in his lexicon. Other evils, in Phillips' opinion, were the national debt, government questionnaires, income taxes, fireside chats, and Eleanor Roosevelt.
Phillips never took himself very seriously, although he certainly considered his work as more than mere escapist humor.
Quotes from others about the person
In 1942, John Chamberlain described Purkey as the "prototype of the serio-comic, lovable, and thoroughly honest-to-goodness American soldier - (he) is a character of parts, and it is not unlikely that he will be remembered long after the present war is over. "
His close friend John Kieran once joked that "Phillips is full of ideas, most of them quite strange. " Kieran also observed, "It is altogether likely that the trials of Private Purkey in war are but a subconscious reflection of the vicissitudes of Colonel Phillips in peace. "
According to his obituary in the New York Times, Phillips "seldom or never referred to 'the American way, ' but it was in that pasture that he pitched his tent. "
On February 8, 1916, Phillips married Mary Irene Gallagher; they had no children. His wife died in 1938, and on November 26 of that year he married Cecilia Carney. They had one son.
