BIOGRAPHIES: Christopher Morley
John Gehl sends this bio of the American man of letters Christopher Morley (1890-1957), who was a prominent literary personage in the first half of the 20th century. Morley was a writer's writer, just as interested in promoting the works of other writers as he was of his own. His long tenure on the staff of the Saturday Review of Literature gave him a prominent podium for promoting the literary culture that he considered so important to living life to the full. He vigorously promoted the works of Joseph Conrad, Sherwood Anderson, Walt Whitman, Robert Louis Stevenson, George Santayana and the many other writers whose works, in his opinion, deserved wider public exposure. As a long serving judge for the Book-of-the-Month Club, Morley was delighted to be in a position to influence a generation of Americans' reading habits.
Morley was born in Haverford, Pennsylvania, where his father was a professor of mathematics at Haverford College. Ten years later the family moved to Baltimore, Maryland, because Morley's father joined the faculty at Johns Hopkins. Morley returned to attend Haverford College, and then spent three years at Oxford's New College as a Rhodes scholar. While at Oxford he published The Eighth Sin, a book of verses inspired by Helen Booth Fairchild, a fellow American student and the woman he would marry a few years later. After Oxford, Morley went to work as a book reader and sales publicist for the publisher F.N. Doubleday. Success in this job did not keep him from taking a job as editor of The Ladies Home Journal in Pennsylvania. Later he got to write his own column at the Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger. While in Philadelphia, Morley wrote his first novel Parnassus on Wheels, which described the adventures of a traveling bookseller.
Once launched into his journalist's career, Morley enjoyed literary success in many venues. He wrote popular columns for the New York Evening Post and the Saturday Review of Literature. He published novels including Thunder on the Left, Human Being, and the best-selling Kitty Foyle. He also published collections of his columns, essays, and poems, and took on the job of editing two major revisions of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. Another noteworthy accomplishment was his work in co-founding the Hoboken Theatrical Company in an old New Jersey warehouse, turned into a sort of off off-Broadway playhouse for producing a series of successful revivals along with several of Morley's own plays. An enthusiastic fan of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, Morley helped found the Baker Street Irregulars, an organization of true Holmes devotees. Morley died in 1957 following several debilitating strokes in the preceding five years. As a journalist, he belonged to a small, elite band of literary columnists that once included writers like Don Marquis and Franklin P. Adams, now no longer visible on the journalistic landscape.
Ed Jajko comments on John Gehl's bio of Christopher Morley: Christopher Morley's name was well-known in the Philadelphia that I was born and grew up in, thanks to his work on the Evening Public Ledger, a newspaper that folded when I was an infant, and his editing the Ladies Home Journal, issued by the Curtis Publishing Company, a Philadelphia institution that had its headquarters in a handsome building across the street from Independence Hall. Philadelphia appreciated Morley's having set his Kitty Foyle in the city, in working-class Frankford. In the book, Kitty Foyle and her family live on Griscom Street, in a block of two-story row houses with front porches. Whenever I walked along Oxford Avenue between my parents' house on Allengrove Street and the Frankford El station at Margaret-Orthodox, the last street I passed paralleling Frankford Avenue was Griscom Street. After reading the book, I always thought of Morley's fictional characters, who would have been just down the street to my right. The 1940 movie starring Ginger Rogers in the title role did a disservice to the story, since the actors did not even attempt to reproduce the distinctive "Fluffya" accent of what has been called Philadelphia Cockney.
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Ronald Hilton 2004
last updated:
November 28, 2004