Was Algonquin Round Table Writer Alexander Woolcott the Original Influencer?
Before there were influencers, there was Alexander Woollcott.
Not that anyone reads or discusses Woollcott anymore. But in many ways, the critic’s network of projects and outlets feels like a template for today’s social-media power brokers. Long before Instagram or TikTok, Woollcott parlayed his famous friends into a career that encompassed everything from travel writing to a national radio show to touring the country playing himself in The Man Who Came to Dinner. His theater reviews had him briefly banned by some producers, and his book reviews were the forerunner of Oprah’s Book Club when it came to propelling unknown authors onto bestseller lists. Yet somehow today, Woollcott is mostly remembered for eating lunch at the Algonquin Round Table with Dorothy Parker.
Woollcott’s genius lay in the combination of gushing fanboy and incisive critic. He not only proselytized for his famous friends’ work—he often worked closely with them to make it better. Many, including its creator, James Hilton, credit Woollcott with transforming Goodbye, Mr. Chips from manuscript into a bestseller that earned an Oscar-winning movie adaptation. And his genuine delight in sharing his preferences in print or on radio broadcasts feels like a prototype for Pinterest boards and Instagram grids. As we all scour the Internet for things to bring us joy instead of more anxiety or rage, Woollcott’s cheerful enthusiasm feels as modern to us as it did ridicule-worthy to his contemporaries.
The general attitude among the intelligentsia after Woollcott died is best summed up by his brief mention in All About Eve, a movie set in his beloved Broadway milieu. “I am once more available for dancing in the streets and shouting from the housetops," Margo Channing dryly quotes from Addison DeWitt’s column, before sniping, “I thought that one went out with Woollcott.”
Parker too was one of those slightly scornful contemporaries, even while Woollcott himself helped burnish the Parker brand in “Our Mrs. Parker.” In it, he is as insightful about her enduring appeal as any 21st-century scholar. “It will be noted, I am afraid, that Mrs. Parker specializes in what is known as the dirty crack,” he wrote. “If it seems so, it may well be because disparagement is easier to remember, and the fault therefore, if fault there be, lies in those of us who—and who does not?—repeat her sayings.”
Part of the problem with Woollcott lies in that Henry Jamesian sentence. He was a chronicler of books, films, theater, true crime, and people, a sometimes performer, a radio show host, an in-demand lecturer, and more, but he was also an over-the-top public personality who delighted in his extraness. Today, we recognize that elaborately artificial prose as high camp, but for a contemporary of Hemingway’s it seemed hopelessly old-fashioned, even as it disguised the stiletto he often wielded.
The inescapable irony is that Parker’s disparaging lines are now plastered on Etsy merchandise while Woollcott’s vast output of sharp, insightful writing was written off as “gushing” and fell out of favor almost immediately after his death.
That reputation was already beginning to dog him even at the height of his fame and popularity; one irate Midwestern reader complained that his book recommendations amounted to force feeding marshmallows to Americans. The man who championed Ernest Hemingway and Evelyn Waugh and included Willa Cather as essential reading was not amused.
But as Woollcott himself had written, disparagement is easier to remember. So, his own pioneering efforts continue to languish undisturbed. Long before My Favorite Murder made true crime podcasting into a cottage industry, Woollcott was mining the pages of Police Gazette for what he termed “human gore,” transforming murder and mayhem into radio broadcasts and articles for high-toned publications like Collier’s and the New Yorker.
An early fascination with Lizzie Borden led him to cover criminals ranging from housewife Myrtle Bennett, who shot and killed her husband in the Bridge Murder case, and convicted murderer David Lamson. After thoroughly researching the case until he was convinced of Lamson’s innocence, Woollcott used his immense powers of influence to draw national attention to the case, and Lamson was acquitted after his retrial.
Woollcott typically had no patience for injustice, even as he greeted close friends with insults like, “Hello repulsive.” Once banned from reviewing shows produced by the Shuberts, he took his case to the New York State Supreme Court (and lost). And his first radio show ended in 1935 when sponsor Cream of Wheat demanded that Woollcott stop making “caustic references to people like Hitler and Mussolini.” Woolcott responded by walking away from his $80,000 a year contract.
His own contradictions may have helped accelerate the demise of his reputation. Parker, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and other contemporaries have a more cohesive brand—Woollcott is a man whose embrace of his own eclectic tastes earned him the label of lightweight. But while he succumbed to nostalgia as much as he championed modernity (was any other major critic in the ‘30s demanding more attention to the novels of Booth Tarkington?), he could be as waspish as any of the more quoted members of the Algonquin Round Table.
Woollcott, after all, was the one who described Los Angeles as “seven suburbs in search of a city” and wrote of a play that culminated in the hero’s admission that he had been castrated, “In the first act she becomes a lady. In the second act, he becomes a lady.” That kind of airy dismissal is now the default, but at the time Woollcott’s casualness was infuriating to producers. A similar tone earned Parker an anthology of her theatrical reviews; Woollcott’s remain yellowing away in archives.
But what cries out for anthologizing are his Shouts & Murmurs columns for the New Yorker. Created by Woollcott (and named after a credit he spied for background noises in a London theater program), the weekly page is a prototype of Twitter. Woollcott collected trivia about his famous friends, half-forgotten icons, and hot takes on the events of the day in his inimitable style. Editor Wolcott Gibbs once described him as “one of the most dreadful writers who ever existed,” but that didn’t stop While Rome Burns, his collection of previously published articles, from becoming a bestseller.
Like all of Woollcott’s work, the book is long out of print, which means that the most enduring take on him remains that of his friends George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart in The Man Who Came to Dinner. The classic 1939 comedy about an irascible critic who is forced to stay at the home of his dinner party hosts was written for Woollcott, who was forced to turn down the original Broadway production due to prior commitments but went on to play the role many times before his death in 1943.
Perhaps unsurprisingly for a workaholic, Woollcott died of a heart attack a few hours after appearing as a guest on radio broadcast The People’s Platform. Long, Long Ago, a collection of his writings that he was working on at the time of his death, was published posthumously a few months later. A collection of his letters was published in 1944, followed the next year by The Portable Woollcott. And after that, the man who championed so many remained unpublished. Attempts were made to re-evaluate his contributions to the arts by both biographer Edwin P. Hoyt in 1968’s Alexander Woollcott: The Man Who Came to Dinner and by Wayne Chatterton a decade later in a monograph from Boise State University, but he remains almost stubbornly unrehabilitable.
Then again, Woollcott himself perhaps saw the writing on the wall long before he achieved even a modicum of success. When asked as a child to share his greatest ambition, Woollcott claimed to have written, “to be a fabulous monster.”
That may explain why he remains forever on the periphery of the era he helped define—and is as good a reason as any to rediscover him now.
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