George S. Brooks

George Sprague Brooks (1895–1961) was a playwright, author, editor and lecturer whose work appeared frequently in the Saturday Evening Post.

Born February 7, 1895 in Pearl Creek, Wyoming County, New York, George S. Brooks was the great-great-grandson of Revolutionary War brigadier general and chaplain David Brooks. George S. Brooks attended Middleburg Academy, Salt Lake Collegiate Institute and the high school at Warsaw, New York. He then attended University of Rochester in fall 1931. He was friends with classic scholar James Marshall Campbell. The two had youthful plans of building a law practice together, but when Brooks failed the freshman English course he withdrew from college and pursued other career paths.

In 1914, he attempted to enlist in the Canadian Army. However, he was deported back to the US for making a false declaration of citizenship. When the US entered World War I, he enlisted in 302nd Ammunition Train with the American Expeditionary Forces overseas, otherwise known as a "doughboy". He saw action in the Chateau-Thierry offensive, the Aisne offensive, and the Meuse-Argonne offensive. Brooks was one of a group of 249 American soldiers—both officers and enlisted men—who briefly attended the University of Poitiers as full-time students in 1919 after having fought on the Western Front. The University of Poitiers is one of France's oldest universities, founded in 1431. The Poitiers group was part of a larger experiment involving soldier-students at 15 other French universities as well as the Universities of London, Edinburgh, Oxford, and Cambridge. The experiment foreshadows later efforts on behalf of veterans' education such as the G.I. Bill of 1944 and subsequent programs.

After Poitiers, he held eleven different newspaper jobs before returning to Rochester. In 1922 he became a reporter for the Rochester Herald until 1925. Here he began collaborating on fiction pieces with correspondent and sketch-writer Henry Clune.S. S. McClure was impressed by Brooks’ Herald articles invited him to New York. Brooks became managing editor of McClure's. When the publication was bought by the Hearst Corporation, Brooks resigned. He became managing editor of Shrine Magazine. Whilst in New York, Brooks renewed his acquaintance with Walter Lister, the city editor of the New York Evening Post. With Lister, Brooks embarked on writing his first play.

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