Alexander Woollcott
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Alexander Humphreys Woollcott (January 19, 1887 – January 23, 1943) was a critic and commentator for The New Yorker magazine, and a member of the Algonquin Round Table. He was the inspiration for Sheridan Whiteside, the main character in the play The Man Who Came to Dinner by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. His review of the Marx Brothers' Broadway debut, I'll Say She Is, helped launch the team's movie career. For many years he wrote a column called "Shouts and Murmurs" for The New Yorker, as well as being its drama critic. He was, however, frequently criticized for his ornate, florid style of writing and, in contrast to his contemporaries James Thurber and S.J. Perelman, he is little read today, although his book, While Rome Burns, published by Grosset & Dunlap in 1934 was in 1954 named by critic Vincent Starrett as one of the 52 Best Loved Books of the Twentieth Century.
Wolcott Gibbs, who often edited Woollcott's work at The New Yorker, was quoted in Thurber's book The Years with Ross as saying: "'Shouts and Murmurs' was about the strangest copy I ever edited. You could take every other sentence out without changing the sense a particle. Whole department, in fact, often had no more substance than a Talk [of the Town] anecdote. I guess he was one of the most dreadful writers who ever existed."
He was also known for his occasionally savage wit. He once said about another contemporary wit and piano player: "There is absolutely nothing wrong with Oscar Levant that a miracle can't fix." He also was known to greet friends with, "Hello, Repulsive."
Woollcott graduated from Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, and is fondly remembered there. In his early twenties he contracted the mumps, which left him mostly, if not completely, impotent. He never married or had children, although he had a large number of female friends.
He was also one of the most-quoted men of his generation. Among Woollcott's classics is his description of the Los Angeles area as "Seven suburbs in search of a city"—a quip often attributed to his friend Dorothy Parker. He also once described The New Yorker editor Harold Ross: "He looks like a dishonest Abe Lincoln."
Woollcott called for normalization of U.S.-Soviet relations. He was a friend of reporter Walter Duranty and Soviet foreign minister Maxim Litvinov, and traveled to the USSR in the 1930s.
Towards the end of Woollcott's life he semi-retired to an island he had purchased on Lake Bomoseen in Vermont. He collapsed in New York City while leading a panel discussion of the war in Europe on the 1943 CBS radio program People's Platform; he died a few hours later, aged 56.
Woollcott is buried at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York.
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