Christopher Morley

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Christopher Morley (5 May 1890–28 March 1957) was an American journalist, novelist, and poet.

He was born in Haverford, Pennsylvania. Morley studied at Haverford College, where he obtained a BA in 1910. He was a Rhodes Scholar at New College, Oxford from 1910 to 1913. Morley got his start as a newspaper reporter and then columnist for various publications in Philadelphia and later New York City.

He was one of the founders and long-time staff member of the Saturday Review of Literature. A highly gregarious man, he was the mainstay of what he dubbed the "Three Hours for Lunch Club". Out of enthusiasm for the Sherlock Holmes stories, he became the founder of the Baker Street Irregulars and wrote the introduction to the standard omnibus edition of The Complete Sherlock Holmes. In 1936 he was appointed to revise and enlarge Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (1937, 1948).

Author of more than 50 books of poetry and novels, Morley is probably best known as the author of Kitty Foyle (1939), which was made into an Academy Award-winning movie. Other well known works include Thunder on the Left (1925), and The Haunted Bookshop (1919) and Parnassus on Wheels (1917), his two semi-biographical novels of a fictional bookseller.

In later years he lived in Nassau County, Long Island, commuting to the city on the Long Island Rail Road, about which he wrote affectionately. In 1961, a 98-acre park was named in his honor in Nassau County. This park preserves his studio, the "Knothole", as a point of interest, his furniture and bookcases available to the historically-interested public.

[edit] Trivia

Morley was a close friend of Don Marquis, author of the Archy and Mehitabel stories featuring the antics and commentary of a New York cockroach and a cat.

[edit] Quotations

"Printer's ink has been running a race against gunpowder these many, many years. Ink is handicapped, in a way, because you can blow up a man with gunpowder in half a second, while it may take twenty years to blow him up with a book. But the gunpowder destroys itself along with its victim, while a book can keep on exploding for centuries." — Chistopher Morley, The Haunted Bookshop
"Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity."
"A man who has never made a woman angry is a failure in life."
"No man is lonely while eating spaghetti — it requires too much attention."