Heywood Broun

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Heywood Broun
Socialist
Spouses
​
​
(m. 1917; div. 1933)​
Maria Dooley
​
(m. 1935)​
Children
J. G. Taylor Spink Award
(1970)

Heywood Campbell Broun Jr. (

The NewsGuild-CWA. Born in Brooklyn, New York
, he is best remembered for his writing on social issues and his championing of the underdog. He believed that journalists could help right wrongs, especially social ills.

Career

Broun was born in Brooklyn, the third of four children born to Heywood C. Broun and Henrietta Marie (née Brose) Broun.

Broun attended

Scripps-Howard newspapers, including the New York World-Telegram. Broun's column was published in the World-Telegram until Scripps-Howard abruptly decided not to renew his contract. He was then picked up by the New York Post
. Broun's only column appeared in that paper two days before his death.

As a drama critic, in 1917 Broun wrote about actor Geoffrey C. Stein in the controversial play

New York Tribune and Broun for libel; but in light of the judge's jury instructions, Broun and the Tribune won the case.[2] A few weeks later, he had to review a production with Stein in the cast. His only mention of the actor was in the last sentence of his column: "We did not think Geoffrey Stein was up to his usual standards."[3][4]

Broun coined the statement "Posterity is as likely to be wrong as anybody else". It is used widely, often in arguments about documentation and history.[5] From 1927 to 1937, Broun wrote a regular column, titled "It Seems to Heywood Broun", for the magazine The Nation. His column included criticism of another employer, the New York World, who fired Broun as a result. Broun later left The Nation for the rival The New Republic.[6]

In 1930, Broun unsuccessfully ran for the U.S.Congress, as a Socialist. A slogan of Broun's was "I'd rather be right than Roosevelt."

In 1933, along with

The Newspaper Guild
.

Beginning February 8, 1933, Broun starred in a radio program, The Red Star of Broadway, on WOR in Newark, New Jersey. Broun was featured as "The Man About Town of Broadway." Sponsored by Macy's, the program also included musicians and minstrels.[7] In 1938, Broun helped found the weekly tabloid Connecticut Nutmeg, soon renamed Broun's Nutmeg.[8]

Personal life

In 1915, Broun met Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova and they quickly became engaged. She broke off the relationship to rejoin the Ballets Russes in 1916.[9] On June 7, 1917, Broun married writer-editor Ruth Hale, a feminist who later co-founded the Lucy Stone League. At their wedding, the columnist Franklin P. Adams characterized the usually easygoing Broun and the more strident Hale as "the clinging oak and the sturdy vine."[10] The couple had one son, broadcaster Heywood Hale Broun.

Along with his friends (the critic Alexander Woollcott, writer Dorothy Parker and humorist Robert Benchley), Broun was a member of the famed Algonquin Round Table from 1919 to 1929. His usually disheveled appearance led to him being likened to "an unmade bed." He was also close friends with the Marx Brothers, and attended their show The Cocoanuts more than 20 times. Broun joked that his tombstone would read, "killed by getting in the way of some scene shifters at a Marx Brothers show."

In November 1933, Ruth Hale divorced Broun. In 1935, he married a widowed

Fulton Sheen[12] and Reverend Edward Patrick Dowling,[13]

Broun died of

Cemetery of the Gate of Heaven
in Hawthorne, New York.

Legacy

Footnotes

  1. ^ Broun, Heywood (March 31, 1917). "In the Play World - Injunction Needed for Poor Production of Gloomy Play by Wedekind". New York Tribune. p. 13. Retrieved September 13, 2021.
  2. ^ "Critic Upheld in Actor's Suit Charging Libel". New York Tribune. February 15, 1919. p. 13. Retrieved September 13, 2021.
  3. ^ Broun, Heywood (April 9, 1919). ""A Good Bad Woman" at the Harris; Matinee of "Shakuntula"". New York Tribune. p. 11. Retrieved July 8, 2022.
  4. ^ Broun, Heywood (March 1924). "Two on the Aisle". The Cosmopolitan. Vol. LXXVI, no. 5. p. 69. Retrieved September 13, 2021.
  5. ^ Sitting on the World, New York: GP Putnam's Sons, 1924
  6. ISBN 1560250011
    .
  7. Broadcasting
    . February 15, 1933. Retrieved October 7, 2014.
  8. ^ a b Gale, Robert L. An F. Scott Fitzgerald Encyclopedia. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998, p. 49
  9. OCLC 893656800
    .
  10. ^ Broun, Heywood Hale. Whose Little Boy Are You?: A Memoir of the Broun Family. St. Martin's Press, 1983. p. 6
  11. ^ Feinberg, Louis. The Satirist. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2006, p. 157.
  12. ^ "Bishop Fulton Sheen: The First "Televangelist"". Time. April 14, 1952. Archived from the original on August 25, 2013. Retrieved January 21, 2011.
  13. ^ Amiri, Rachel (February 16, 2021). "Is Conversion Ever a Phone Call Away?". Where Peter Is. Retrieved February 17, 2021.
  14. ^ "Heywood Broun Award | The NewsGuild - TNG-CWA". December 21, 2017. Archived from the original on November 29, 2020. Retrieved September 6, 2022.
  15. Baseball Hall of Fame
  16. ^ Internet Movie Database entry for Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle
  17. ^ "The It Girl", IMDb, Z: The Beginning of Everything, retrieved September 6, 2022
  18. ^ Donnelly, Erin (January 28, 2017). "R29 Binge Club: "Z: The Beginning Of Everything" Episodes 1-10 Recap". www.refinery29.com. Retrieved September 6, 2022.

Works

  • The A.E.F. (1918)
  • Our Army at the Front (1918)
  • The 51st Dragon (1919)
  • Seeing Things at Night (1921)
  • The Boy Grew Older (1922)
  • Pieces of Hate (1922)
  • The Sun Field (1923)
  • Sitting On The World (1924)
  • Gandle Follows His Nose (1926)
  • Anthony Comstock: Roundsman of the Lord (with Margaret Leech) (1927)
  • Christians Only: A Study in Prejudice (1931)
  • It Seems to Me (1935) —Collection of columns
  • Collected Edition (1941) —Collection of columns

Further reading

  • Everett F. Bleiler, The Checklist of Fantastic Literature. Chicago: Shasta Publishers, 1948; pg. 62.
  • Robert E. Drennan, The Algonquin Wits. [1968] Secaucus, NJ: Citadell Press, 1985.
  • John L. Lewis et al., Heywood Broun: As He Seemed to Us. New York: Random House/Newspaper Guild of New York, 1940.
  • Christopher Phelps, "Heywood Broun, Benjamin Stolberg, and the Politics of American Labor Journalism in the 1920s and 1930s," Labor: Studies in Working-Class History, vol. 15, no. 1 (March 2018), pp. 25–51.
  • The New York Times, "3,000 Mourn Broun at St. Patrick's Mass", December 21, 1939, pg. 23.
  • The New York Times, "Newspaper Guild Begins to Function", November 16, 1933.

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to Heywood Broun.
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