Alexander Woollcott

Alexander Humphreys Woollcott ( born January 19, 1887 in Phalanx at Red Bank, New Jersey, † January 23, 1943 in New York City, New York ) was an American author, journalist and literary critic.

Life

Alexander Woollcott grew up in poverty. Through support of the friend of Dr. Alexander Humphreys family (after whom he was named ), he studied at Hamilton College in New York City and went as a bachelor's degree in English Literature from. Until the outbreak of the First World War he worked as a journalist for The New York Times. In 1916 he volunteered for the army, and came with the U.S. Army Eighteenth Engineers Railway Regiment to France.

In Paris Woollcott worked troops in the newspaper Stars and Stripes, one of eight pages. Within a short time he became acquainted with the journalist Harold Ross, Cyrus Baldridge, Franklin Pierce Adams and Jane Grant.

Back in New York he was in the 1920s a frequent guest in the literary circle in the Algonquin Hotel, called the Algonquin Round Table, a loose group of journalists, writers and actors. The core of the artists who dropped there at the time, including Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Robert E. Sherwood, Heywood Broun, Marc Connelly, Alice Duer Miller, Harpo Marx, Jascha Heifetz, Janet Flanner, Solita Solano, Ruth Hale, George S. Kaufman, Harold Ross, Neysa McMein, Franklin Pierce Adams, Edna Ferber, Irving Berlin and Bernard Baruch.

At the same time got Woollcott in the weekly magazine The New York Times his own column ( Shouts & Murmurs ), in which he reported on the social and cultural life in the city. Through the friendship with the British journalist Walter Duranty and the Soviet Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov Maximowitsch, traveled Woollcott in the 1930s in the Soviet Union. In his radio broadcasts Woollcott commented on the way the Soviet Union in Stalin -friendly way, which he did not deny the brutality of the regime, but told from the historical and economic conditions of Russia and justified. During a radio broadcast Alexander Woollcott suffered a stroke - the consequences of which he died.

Worth mentioning

• In the 1920s, Woollcott promoted the career of the Marx Brothers, who became known through films, television and theater performances with musical interludes and subsequent comic -inspired instrumental.
• In 1935 he made ​​a guest appearance in the drama A charming villain ( The Scoundrel ).
• The role of Waldo Lydecker, played by actor Clifton Webb, in the film Laura (1944 ) is based on the life of the well-known columnist, radio reporter and theater critic Alexander Woollcott.
• In 1939 he appeared in the documentary Five Times Five to which he had also written the screenplay.

Gallery

Art Samuels, Harpo Marx, Charlie MacArthur, Dorothy Parker and Alexander Woollcott, 1919