William Jacob Cuppy was an American humorist and literary critic.
Background
William Jacob Cuppy was born on August 23, 1884 in Auburn, Indiana, United States. He was the second of three children and the older of two sons of Thomas Jefferson Cuppy and Mary Francis (Stahl) Cuppy. Of Huguenot origin, Will's paternal ancestors had migrated from South Carolina; his mother's forebears were Pennsylvania Dutch. His paternal grandfather, Abram Cuppy, was an Indiana state senator. Cuppy's father sold sewing machines and worked as a cobbler. His mother ran a small shop in which she sold embroidery and other fancywork; she may also have taught school. She sang in the Presbyterian church while Will or his brother pumped the organ. Cuppy recalled happy childhood summers on his widowed grandmother's farm near South Whitley, Indiana, "where I acquired my first knowledge of the birds and the flowers and all the other aspects of animate nature which I have treated none too kindly in some of my writings".
Education
Cuppy graduated from Auburn high school in 1902 and in the same year entered the University of Chicago. After receiving a Ph. B. in 1907, he worked toward a Ph. D. in English literature. Cuppy enjoyed the sheltered, scholarly life of a graduate student and lingered at Chicago until 1914, when he received his M. A. in English.
Career
In 1909 he completed his first book Maroon Tales--short stories of fraternity life written at the request of university authorities who desired that he create some "traditions" for the recently inaugurated fraternity system.
He went to New York City to begin a career in journalism. In his later humorous writing, his favorite role was that of the diffident but intellectually assertive and rhetorically pompous pedant and scholar.
During World War I, Cuppy served as a second lieutenant in the Motor Transport Corps. After the war he worked on the New York Herald-Tribune, where in 1926 he began a new column in the Sunday book review section entitled "Light Reading, " later renamed "Mystery and Adventure. "
He did much of his writing in his isolated cabin on Jones Island, off Long Island, where he lived from 1921 to 1929 and which he revisited regularly for the rest of his life. In the sketches collected in his first humorous volume, How to Be a Hermit (1929), he ridiculed, despite much self-denigration, the pretensions of a gadget-oriented culture and maintained that "a hermit is simply a person to whom civilization has failed to adjust itself. " Because of the recipes included in it, which he created while living in his cabin, the Library of Congress classified it under "culinary arts. " Subsequent collections of essays and sketches, How to Tell Your Friends from the Apes (1931)--most of which appeared first in the New Yorker--How to Become Extinct (1941), and How to Attract the Wombat (1949), were, as he rightly implies, much more than "little pieces about animals. " In the guise of a "bookish old recluse" obsessed with natural history, Cuppy attacked, on behalf of reason and tolerance, the gullibility and self-destructiveness of the "modern man or nervous wreck, " the arrogance of specialists in science and the humanities, and the shallow optimism that dominated popular culture. Two posthumous volumes selected from Cuppy's notes by Fred Feldkamp, his friend and literary executor, were The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody (1950) --satirical essays on historical figures from Cheops to Miles Standish--and How to Get from January to December (1951)--arranged as a comic almanac. He also wrote humorous footnotes for W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman's Garden Rubbish and Other Country Bumps (1937) and edited collections of crime fiction: Murder Without Tears (1946), The World's Great Detective Stories (1943), and The World's Great Mystery Stories (1943).
Before beginning to write even a short piece, he would read sometimes as many as twenty-five books on the subject, from which he would amass hundreds of note cards; The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody, on which Cuppy started work in 1933, was distilled from about 15, 000 such cards.
In saying it with something of the iconoclasm of Ambrose Bierce and H. L. Mencken and in making skillful use of irony, anticlimax, free association, wordplay, and other devices exercised on a wider range of material by such humorists as Robert Benchley and James Thurber, Cuppy made a unique contribution to the sophisticated, urban-oriented humorous essay, which in the twentieth century has overshadowed the older tradition of rustic, crackerbarrel humor while preserving some of its neighborly informality.
Although he would work and live like a hermit for weeks at a time among his files in the Greenwich Village apartment where he lived during the last twenty years of his life, he had an unusual capacity for friendship and was in some demand as a lecturer.
After a long period of failing health, he was found unconscious in his apartment on September 9, 1949, and taken to St. Vincent's Hospital, where he died ten days later. The cause of death was variously reported as coronary arteriosclerosis and as barbiturate poisoning with complications. His remains were cremated in accordance with his wishes, and interred in a mausoleum near the grave of his mother in Woodlawn Cemetery, Auburn, Indiana.
Views
Quotations:
"Borrowing has a bad name, but you would be surprised how it helps in a pinch. ''
''I borrow to pay my honest debts and not to squander foolishly. What's more, I confine my borrowing to those who can well afford it. I don't go around sponging on widows and orphans unless they have plenty. ''
''I think you are absolutely right about everything, except I think humor springs from rage, hay fever, overdue rent and miscellaneous hell. ''
''I hear so many things about who I am supposed to be I hardly know what to believe. I am willing to tell all, but what Is it? Doubtless all these myths and legends will be straightened out eventually, but It may take years. ''
''I am billed as a humorist, but of course I am a tragedian at heart. ''
Personality
Cuppy suffered from an inferiority complex that doubtless contributed to his perfectionism as a researcher.
Quotes from others about the person
"When a scientist begins to read Will Cuppy's 'How to Become Extinct, ' it doesn't seem as funny as he thought it would be because so much of it is scientifically correct. The scientist reader sort of comes to and realizes that Will Cuppy is saying what he always wanted to in class but never dared. " (William Beebe)