January 19 , 1887

Alexander Woollcott (January 19, 1887 to January 23, 1943) was a drama critic and one of the original Algonquin Table set. That crowd overlapped with the New Yorker writers, a label he could also claim. From our perspective generations beyond the 1920s, it is sad to read Dorothy Parkers words, somewhat to this effect. "We thought we were the best writers in the world, never considering this was the time Faulkner was working, and that we could only be second-rate."

Here is a detailed biographical sketch of Woollcott, from which we quote:

Alexander Humphreys Woollcott was born in Colts Neck Township, New Jersey, on 19th January, 1887. His father, Walter Woollcott, was a successful businessman and had an income of $5,700 but Woollcott later recalled that his memories of childhood are "slightly overcast by clouds of financial anxiety".....


In 1914 Woollcott became the drama critic of the New York Times. He had strong opinions on how the job should be done. "There is a popular notion that a dramatic criticism, to be worthy of the name, must be an article of at least 1,000 words, mostly polysyllables and all devoted - perfectly devoted - to the grave discussion of some play as written and performed... The tradition of prolixity and the dullness in all such writing is as old as Aristotle ....." His daily column was an instant success. One journalist argued: "Woollcott set forth reflectively his opinions of plays and players against a background of broad dramatic knowledge, spicing the seriousness of his treatment with lively anecdotal matter.

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In the winter of 1914 Woollcott joined ...[friends] in Paris. They ... covered the trial of Henriette Caillaux, who had murdered Gaston Calmette, the editor of Le Figaro, who she had accused of slandering her husband, Joseph Caillaux, the Minister of Finance.

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Robert E. Sherwood, Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley all worked at Vanity Fair during the First World War. They began taking lunch together in the dining room at the Algonquin Hotel.....[When Woollcott joined them it was said he] "resembled a plump owl... who was a droll, often preposterous, often sentimental, often waspish, and always flamboyantly self-dramatic."
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Samuel Hopkins Adams, the author of Alexander Woollcott: His Life and His World (1946), has argued: "The Algonquin profited mightily by the literary atmosphere, and Frank Case evinced his gratitude by fitting out a workroom where Broun could hammer out his copy and Benchley could change into the dinner coat which he ceremonially wore to all openings. Woollcott and Franklin Pierce Adams enjoyed transient rights to these quarters. Later Case set aside a poker room for the whole membership." The poker players included Woollcott,Herbert Bayard Swope, Harpo Marx, Jerome Kern and Prince Antoine Bibesco. On one occasion, Woollcott lost four thousand dollars in an evening, and protested: "My doctor says it's bad for my nerves to lose so much."

...[At] the hotel they played games besides poker]. One of the most popular was "I can give you a sentence". This involved each member taking a multi syllabic word and turning it into a pun within ten seconds.Dorothy Parker was the best at this game. For "horticulture" she came up with, "You can lead a whore to culture, but you can't make her thin."


Some members of the Algonquin Round Table began to complain about the nastiness of some of the humour as it gained the reputation for being the "Vicious Circle". Donald Ogden Stewart commented: "It wasn't much fun to go there, with everybody on stage. Everybody was waiting his chance to say the bright remark so that it would be in Franklin Pierce Adams' column the next day... it wasn't friendly... Woollcott, for instance, did some awfully nice things for me. There was a terrible sentimental streak in Alec, but at the same time, there was a streak of hate that was malicious."


John Keats, the author of You Might as Well Live: Life and Times of Dorothy Parker (1975) has argued that Woollcott was mainly responsible for this change in atmosphere: "Over the years, good humour had given way to banter, and now banter had given way to insult.

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[In 1929] Woollcott purchased with Harold Ross and his wife Jane Grant a large house on West Forty-Seventh Street. They were joined by Hawley Truax, Kate Oglebay and William Powell. She later wrote: "It was a mad, amusing ménage, made up of Aleck, Hawley Truax, Ross and myself as owners and at first there were two others, Kate Oglebay and William Powell, as tenants and participants on the top floor. It soon became the hangout for all the literary and musical crowd and I well remember that on one Sunday evening I had twenty-eight unexpected guests for supper... We all had separate apartments, sharing only the dining-room and kitchen."


...[And later.] In July 1942, Alice Duer Miller [a close friend] wrote a letter to Woollcott telling him that she was dying. He wrote to her mutual friend, Marie Belloc Lowndes: "It will be no surprise to you that she took the bad news in her stride, and accepted it with philosophic serenity, revealing in her letters and her talks only a kind of rueful amusement at her own predicament. Of course, she made everything as easy as possible for those around her, and drifted off at last looking so pretty and benign." Alice's death caused Woollcott great pain.


Woollcott died less than a year after Miller. We know this brilliant troubled soul had a cat. From The Letters of Alexander Woollcot (1944) we note a letter dated November 19, 1936, from his address at 10 Gracie Square mentioning that he sent someone to Vermont with directions to bring back "my cat, shepherd dog, music-box and binoculars."