March 28, 1957

Christopher Morley (May 5, 1890 to March 28, 1957) was a writer, more famous before his death. He occupied a position of solid erudition among the intelligentsia of the United States during his lifetime. He was one of the first judges of the Book of the Month Club, and a longtime contributor to the Saturday Review of Literature.  He revised and enlarged both the 11th (1937) and 12th (1948) editions of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations.

Such a man has heroes who sell books. This is the setting for the novels Parnassus on Wheels, (1917) and The Haunted Bookshop (1919.) In the last title he describes books as producing in men the same feelings as "would happen to a cat if she had to live in a room tapestried with catnip "

And heroes who write books, people  like Thomas Hardy:

If enough thoughtful Germans had read The Dynasts before July, 1914, there would have been no war.....Sometimes I wake up at night and look out of the window and imagine I hear Hardy laughing. I get him a little mixed up with the Deity....

This last quote, also from The Haunted Bookshop , was written when the end of the war was in sight, and the cost beginning to be calculated. Morley's faith in the power of words was his least original belief.