Background
He was born in 1889 in Worcester, Massachusetts, United States. When he was nine, his beloved older brother Edmund was killed in the Spanish-American War, prompting the outburst from his mother, "Why couldn't it have been Robert?"
He was born in 1889 in Worcester, Massachusetts, United States. When he was nine, his beloved older brother Edmund was killed in the Spanish-American War, prompting the outburst from his mother, "Why couldn't it have been Robert?"
He attended Phillips Exeter Academy and was graduated from Harvard University in 1912.
Even in high school Benchley was active in theater, getting work as an extra with touring road companies when they appeared in Worcester.
In 1916 he was hired as a reporter for the New York Tribune through the influence of Franklin P. Adams.
He worked as a theatrical press agent for a few weeks and then as the aircraft news censor for the Aircraft Board, a position he resigned out of loyalty to a friend falsely accused of being pro-German.
Benchley became managing editor of Vanity Fair magazine in 1919; within a year his drama critic, Dorothy Parker, was fired for a blast at Billie Burke, the actress wife of producer Florenz Ziegfeld, and Benchley resigned in support of critical independence.
1922, the year which saw Benchley's second book, Love Conquers All.
It became his best-known work.
He was signed to present it professionally in the Music Box Review, which he did for nine months in 1923, and he took it to the screen in 1928.
The late 1920 and early 1930 saw his association with the fledgling New Yorker magazine become closer.
Meanwhile he published Pluck and Luck (1925), The Early Worm (1927), 20, 000 Leagues Under the Sea, or David Copperfield (1928), The Treasurer's Report (1930), No Poems (1932), and From Bed to Worse (1934).
Benchley's popularity in Hollywood continued to grow as he made more one-reel and two-reel shorts in 1928 and 1929, most of them monologues based on the model of"The Treasurer's Report. "
In 1932 he played a cameo role in the full-length feature Sport Parade, the first of many such appearances.
Although he published My Ten Years in a Quandary in 1936, After 1903 - What?
in 1938, Inside Benchley in 1942, and Benchley Beside Himself in 1943, his interest in writing was decreasing and his absorption with film growing more complete.
There were three posthumous anthologies of his work, Benchley - Or Else!
(1947), Chips off the Old Benchley (1949), and The Benchley Roundup (1954), all of them consisting largely of previously uncollected essays, some of which the humorist himself evidently did not wish to include in other anthologies.
Further, he was capable of whimsy, as in "The Benchley-Whittier Correspondence"; hyperbole, as in "The Treasurer's Report"; the ridiculous, as in "Chemists' Sporting Extra"; and satire, as in "Tabloid Editions. "
Quotations:
Benchley's wry observation, "It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous. "
Benchley's most quoted quip, delivered on a rainy day, was "I've got to get out of these wet clothes and into a dry martini. "
Quotes from others about the person
Dave Barry, author and judge of the 2006 and 2007 Robert Benchley Society Award for Humor, has called Benchley his "idol" and he "always wanted to write like [Benchley]. "
Robert Benchley met Gertrude Darling in high school in Worcester. They became engaged during his senior year at Harvard, and they married in June 1914. Their first child, Nathaniel Benchley, was born a year later. A second son, Robert Benchley, Jr. , was born in 1919.