1. Alexander Humphreys Woollcott was an American drama critic for The New York Times and the New York Herald, critic and commentator for The New Yorker magazine, a member of the Algonquin Round Table, an occasional actor and playwright, and a prominent radio personality.
Alexander Humphreys Woollcott was the youngest of five children of William and Frances Bucklin Woollcott, born on January 19,1887.
In 1889 the itinerant and often absentee Walter Alexander Woollcott moved his family to Kansas City, Missouri.
The Woollcotts lived in an upscale neighborhood where, at the age of four, Alexander portrayed the character of Puck from A Midsummer Night's Dream in a tableau vivant before an audience of more than 100 at the Woollcott home.
The six years Alexander Woollcott lived in Kansas City were transformative, and set him on the literary and theatrical path that would guide the rest of his life.
Alexander Woollcott was accompanied by his neighbor, Kansas City Times columnist Roswell Field, brother of famed author Eugene Field.
In 1895 Walter Woollcott lost the longest job he'd ever held, and sent his wife Frances and their children back to the Phalanx, where Alexander went to school and spent most of the remainder of his boyhood.
Alexander Woollcott had very few friends during this period and did not enjoy this chapter of his life, with the exception of summers and any time that he could get back to the Phalanx.
Alexander Woollcott joined the staff of The New York Times as a cub reporter in 1909.
In 1914, he was named drama critic and held the post until 1922, with a break for service during World War I In April 1917, the day after war was declared, Woollcott volunteered as a private in the medical corps.
Alexander Woollcott was interested in crime writing, promoting the work of US and British mystery authors in his newspaper articles and on the radio as well as writing on true crime, and became involved in the case of Stanford University Press employee David Lamson, who was accused of murdering his wife.
Alexander Woollcott had no reservations about using this forum to promote his own books, and the continual mentions of his book While Rome Burns probably helped make it a bestseller.
Alexander Woollcott was one of the most quoted men of his generation.
Alexander Woollcott yearned to be as creative as the people with whom he surrounded himself.
Alexander Woollcott starred as Sheridan Whiteside, for whom he was the inspiration, in the traveling production of The Man Who Came to Dinner in 1940.
Alexander Woollcott appeared in several cameos in films in the late 1930s and 1940s.
Alexander Woollcott was a friend of reporter Walter Duranty, even though he described him as a "man from Mars".
Thurber in The Years With Ross reports Alexander Woollcott describing himself as "the best writer in America", but with nothing in particular to say; Wolcott Gibbs made a similar criticism of him.
Alexander Woollcott was primarily a storyteller, a retailer of anecdotes and superior gossip, as many of his personal letters reveal.
Alexander Woollcott's letters reveal a warm and generous heart and a self-effacing manner distinct from his waspish public persona, and his many lasting and close friendships with the theatrical and literary elite of his day.
Alexander Woollcott was friends with actress Katharine Cornell, whom he lauded as the "First Lady of the Theatre".
Alexander Woollcott often gave extremely favorable reviews both to her and the various productions of her husband, director Guthrie McClintic.
Alexander Woollcott never married or had children, although he had some notable female friends, including Dorothy Parker and Neysa McMein, to whom he reportedly proposed the day after she had just wed her new husband, Jack Baragwanath.
In visible distress, Alexander Woollcott commented ten minutes into the broadcast that he was feeling ill, but continued his remarks.
Alexander Woollcott was buried in Clinton, New York, at his alma mater, Hamilton College, but not without some confusion.
At the time of his death, Alexander Woollcott had completed the editorial work on his last book, As You Were, an anthology of fiction, poetry and nonfiction for members of the armed forces.