Christopher Morley
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. His studio, the Knothole,is preserved as a point of interest in a Nassau County park.
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.
"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"
* http://www.nassaulibrary.org/bryant/Localhist/morley.htm - Young photo and Bio
*
Free ebook of Christopher Morley at
Project Gutenberg*
The Baker Street Journal Writings about Sherlock Holmes
