Franklin Pierce Adams

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Franklin Pierce Adams (November 15, 1881 – March 23, 1960), was an American columnist (under the pen name F.P.A.), writer, and wit, part of the famous Algonquin Round Table of the 1920s and 1930s.

Born in Chicago, Illinois, he was the son of Moses and Clara (Schlossberg) Adams. He graduated from the Armour Scientific Academy in 1899 and attended the University of Michigan for one year. He first worked for the Chicago Journal in 1903 but soon moved to the New York Evening Mail, where he worked from 1904 to 1913 and began the famed column which would later be known as "The Conning Tower". In 1913, he moved his column to the New York Tribune, where it would take "The Conning Tower" name, staying there until 1921. During his time on the Evening Mail he wrote what remains his best known work, Baseball's Sad Lexicon, a tribute to the Chicago Cubs double play combination of "Tinker and Evers and Chance."

During World War I, Adams was in the U.S. Army, working on the Stars and Stripes, where he would work with Harold Ross, Alexander Woollcott, and other literary lights of the 1920s. After the war, Adams returned to New York. He went to the New York World, in 1921, writing there until that paper closed in 1931. He returned to his old paper, renamed the New York Herald Tribune, staying until 1937 when he went to the New York Post. He ended his column in September 1941.

During its long run, "The Conning Tower" publicized the work of such writers as Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker, George S. Kaufman, Moss Hart, Edna Ferber, and Deems Taylor. Having one's work published in "The Conning Tower" was enough to launch a career, as in the case of Dorothy Parker and James Thurber. Parker quipped, "He raised me from a couplet." From 1938, he was a panelist on the radio quiz show Information, Please! having written a trivia book with Harry Hansen, Answer This One (1927). He also was a translator of Horace and other classical authors.

He died in New York City in 1960.