Background
He was born Matthew Heywood Campbell Broun, December 7, 1888, in Brooklyn, New York, the third of four children born to Heywood C. Broun and Henrietta Marie (née Brose) Broun.
He was born Matthew Heywood Campbell Broun, December 7, 1888, in Brooklyn, New York, the third of four children born to Heywood C. Broun and Henrietta Marie (née Brose) Broun.
He studied at Harvard but left in 1910 and became a sports reporter for the New York Morning Telegraph.
As a member of the staff of the Tribune (1912 - 1921) he reviewed plays and began his widely read column, "It Seems to Me. " This he took with him to the New York World in 1921 and continued it in the Scripps-Howard newspapers after 1928 when he left the World over a dispute about his liberal views concerning Sacco and Vanzetti. After 1935 he contributed also to The Nation and The New Republic and edited his own weekly newspaper, Broun's Nutmeg, from his home in Stamford, Connecticut. A many-sided man, Broun also wrote novels (Gandle Follows His Nose, 1926) and collaborated on a satiric biography of Anthony Comstock (1927) and a study of anti-Semitism, Christians Only (1931). In 1930 he ran unsuccessfully for Congress as a Socialist and in 1931 produced and acted in his own musical comedy, Shoot the Works. He was a founder and the first president (1933 - 1939) of the American Newspaper Guild. His writings show his devotion to the many liberal causes he upheld. Though he wrote too rapidly and too much, his fluent, persuasive, and humorous style assured him of a wide popularity in his own time. Broun died December 18, 1939, in New York City.
Seven months before his death, Broun, who had been an agnostic, converted to Roman Catholicism after discussions with Fulton Sheen.
Along with his friends the critic Alexander Woollcott, writer Dorothy Parker and humorist Robert Benchley, Broun was a member of the famed Algonquin Round Table from 1919 to 1929, where his usually dishevelled appearance led to him being likened to "an unmade bed. "
On June 7, 1917, Broun married writer-editor Ruth Hale, a feminist, who a few years later co-founded the Lucy Stone League, an organization that fought for women to keep their maiden names after marriage, in the manner of Lucy Stone. They had one son, Heywood Hale Broun.
In November 1933 his wife obtained a divorce. In 1935 he married a widowed chorus girl named Maria Incoronata Fruscella Dooley (stage name Connie Madison).
