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Morley, Christopher, 1890-1957

We have 8 books for this author.

Christopher Morley (5 May 1890–28 March 1957) was an American journalist, novelist, and poet.

Biography

Christopher Morley was born in Haverford, Pennsylvania where his father was a mathematics professor at Haverford College. Arriving home, he headed out to Garden City to begin his life of letters at Doubleday, where he worked as a publicist and first reader of manuscripts. About this time he married Helen Fairchild, and they lived first in Hempstead, and then in Queens Village. Morley moved to Philadelphia where he got his start as a newspaper reporter and then columnist for various publications. In 1920, he returned to New York City and took a job writing the column "The Bowling Green for the New York Post. ^[1]

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. In 1961, a 98-acre park was named in his honor in Nassau County. This park preserves his studio, the "Knothole", as a point of interest, his furniture and bookcases available to the historically-interested public.

Trivia

• 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.
• Morley's widow sold a collection of his personal papers and books to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin after his death.
• Morley was a big fan of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, participating in one of the detective's early fan clubs.^[2]
• Morley edited two editions of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations: 1937 (11th) and 1948 (12th.)^[3]
• Morley's 1939 novel, Kitty Foyle was a bit advanced for its time on the racy side. It sold over one million copies, an instant best-seller.^[4]

Quotations

• "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
• "Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity."
• "A man who has never made a woman angry is a failure in life."
• "No man is lonely while eating spaghetti — it requires too much attention."
• "When you sell a man a book, you don't sell him 12 ounces of paper and ink and glue--you sell him a whole new life."

References

External links

• http://www.nassaulibrary.org/bryant/Localhist/morley.htm — Young photo and Bio
• Works by Christopher Morley at Project Gutenberg
• The Baker Street Journal Writings about Sherlock Holmes

This biographical information was gathered from the Christopher_Morley page, courtesy of the Wikipedia project.

Books

The Haunted Bookshop
In the Sweet Dry and Dry
Kathleen
Mince Pie
Parnassus on Wheels
Plum Pudding Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned
Shandygaff
Where the Blue Begins

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