(Channing Pollock (March 4, 1880 – August 17, 1946) was an...)
Channing Pollock (March 4, 1880 – August 17, 1946) was an American playwright, critic and writer of film scenarios, including The Evil Thereof (1916). He was married to cat breeder and Manhattan Opera House press agent Anna Marble Pollock, daughter of actor and songwriter Edward Marble. Pollock died at his summer home in Shoreham, New York in August 1946, a few months after his wife.
Channing Pollock was an American playwright, author, and lecturer.
Background
He was born on March 4, 1880 in Washington, District of Columbia, United States, the eldest of the three surviving children - two boys and a girl - of Alexander Lyon Pollock and Verona (Larkin) Pollock. His mother was a Virginian of English descent. His father, a Jew who had emigrated from Austria in the 1870's, worked for the Weather Bureau in Washington before becoming a newspaper editor and publisher in Omaha, Nebraska, and Salt Lake City, Utah. His father, while serving as United States consul, died of yellow fever in 1894.
Education
Channing's public school education was supplemented by brief attendance at an Untergymnasium during a visit to relatives in Prague; by tutors in San Salvador; and by study at Bethel Military Academy near Warrenton, Virginia.
Possessed of an urge to write and to dramatize and believing that these ends would be better served by experience than by formal schooling, he unceremoniously left the academy.
Career
At sixteen he obtained a job as reporter, and later as assistant drama editor, on the Washington Post. In 1897 he went to New York City to work for the Dramatic Mirror, but the following year found him back in Washington, this time as drama critic of the Washington Times. His candid review of David Belasco's farce Naughty Anthony, however, lost him this post in 1900.
Once again in New York, Pollock became press agent successively for Florenz Ziegfeld, William A. Brady, and the Shuberts. Brady afforded him the opportunity to dramatize Frank Norris' novel The Pit, which scored a hit in 1903. Meanwhile, in his spare time he wrote In the Bishop's Carriage (based on the romantic novel of Miriam Michelson), which opened and collapsed in Chicago in 1905; and The Little Gray Lady, which toured briefly after a short New York run in 1906.
By 1910 he had produced, in all, nine plays without feeling he was "getting anywhere. " It was then that he made what he later called "a wrong-turning that took the best ten years of my life, " years devoted to "silly jingles and nonsensical stories" - years, too, in which he, as librettist, collaborated with Rennold Wolf on several musical comedies, until the failure of The Grass Widow in 1917. In 1919 Al Woods produced Pollock's "gripping" melodrama The Sign on the Door, which was also presented abroad; in London, it ran for more than a year with Gladys Cooper in the starring role. Woods rejected, however, as religious "bunk" the first of Pollock's serious efforts and what proved to be his most successful play, The Fool, inspired by the life of St. Francis of Assisi. Only after twenty-seven other managers turned the play down did Archie Selwyn venture to stage it.
Next to The Fool, The Enemy was perhaps Pollock's most noteworthy play. It opened in New York in October 1925, and although it never attained the commercial success of The Fool, it remained popular until during World War II it was rejected as pacifist propaganda.
Pollock's last plays had a disheartening reception. Mr. Monneypenny (1928), the story of a man who sells himself to the devil for worldly goods - which he considered his best work - proved his "most expensive failure. " The House Beautiful (1931), depicting the lives of a young couple who endeavor against odds to live the good and simple life.
At the age of fifty-two Pollock withdrew from the theater. Over the years he had done considerable magazine writing and lecturing; he now turned his crusading efforts to these fields.
During his latter years he read and traveled extensively, fulfilling the need for the education he had missed in his youth. In his autobiography, Harvest of My Years (1943), he attributed his happy life to his wife. Pollock died of a cerebral thrombosis at the age of sixty-six at his Shoreham, Long Island, home.
(Channing Pollock (March 4, 1880 – August 17, 1946) was an...)
Religion
Aalthough deeply religious, he belonged to no denomination.
Politics
In politics he was an independent. He supported Great Britain against the Nazis.
Views
Calling himself a "reactionary, " he inveighed against the "cult of sophistication, " racial and religious intolerance, and subversive elements in the schools.
Connections
On August 9, 1906 he married Anna Marble, a press agent; his only child, Helen.