Alexander Woollcott

Alexander Woollcott
Woollcott in 1939 photographed by Carl Van Vechten
Born	(1887-01-19)January 19, 1887 Phalanx, New Jersey
Died	January 23, 1943(1943-01-23) (aged 56) New York City, New York
Resting place	Hamilton College, Clinton, New York
Occupation	Drama critic, essayist, playwright, editor, actor, raconteur, radio personality
Alma mater	Hamilton College
Relatives	Walter Woollcott (father), Frances Grey Bucklin Woollcott (mother), William W. Woollcott (brother)

Alexander Humphreys Woollcott (January 19, 1887 – January 23, 1943) was an American critic and commentator for The New Yorker magazine and a member of the Algonquin Round Table.

He was the inspiration for Sheridan Whiteside, the main character in the play The Man Who Came to Dinner (1939) by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, and for the far less likable character Waldo Lydecker in the film Laura (1944). Woollcott was convinced he was the inspiration for his friend Rex Stout's brilliant, eccentric detective Nero Wolfe, an idea that Stout denied.

Alexander Woollcott was born in an 85-room house, a vast ramshackle building in Colts Neck Township, New Jersey. Known as "the North American Phalanx," it had once been a commune where many social experiments were carried on in the mid-19th century, some more successful than others. When the Phalanx fell apart after a fire in 1854, it was taken over by the Bucklin family, Woollcott's maternal grandparents. Woollcott spent large portions of his childhood there among his extended family. His father was a ne'er-do-well Cockney who drifted through various jobs, sometimes spending long periods away from his wife and children. Poverty was always close at hand. The Bucklins and Woollcotts were avid readers, giving young Aleck (his nickname) a lifelong love of literature, especially the works of Charles Dickens. He also resided with his family in Kansas City, Missouri, where he attended Central High School, where a teacher, Sophie Rosenberger, reportedly "inspired him to literary effort" and with whom he "kept in touch all her life." With the help of a family friend, he made his way through college, graduating from Hamilton College, New York, in 1909. Despite a rather poor reputation (his nickname was "Putrid"), he founded a drama group there, edited the student literary magazine and was accepted by a fraternity. In his early twenties he contracted the mumps, which apparently left him mostly, if not completely, impotent. He 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. Woollcott once told McMein that “I’m thinking of writing the story of our life together. The title is already settled.” McMein: “What is it?” Woollcott: “Under Separate Cover.”)