Will Cuppy
Will Cuppy | |
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Born | William Jacob Cuppy August 23, 1884 Auburn, Indiana, US |
Died | September 19, 1949 New York City, US | (aged 65)
Occupation | Satirist, book reviewer |
Alma mater | University of Chicago |
Genre | Humor, satire |
Notable works | The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody, How to Be a Hermit, How to Become Extinct, How to Tell Your Friends from the Apes, How to Attract the Wombat |
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William Jacob Cuppy (August 23, 1884 – September 19, 1949) was an American humorist and literary critic, known for his satirical books about nature and historical figures.
Early life
Cuppy was born in
Cuppy graduated from Auburn High School in 1902 and went on to the
Literary career
Cuppy supported himself in New York by writing advertising copy while he tried unsuccessfully to write a play.
Seeking refuge from city noise and hay fever (which he referred to as "rose cold"), Cuppy "hermited" from 1921 to 1929 in a shack on Jones Island, just off Long Island's South Shore. The literary result of Cuppy's seaside exile was How to be a Hermit, a humorous look at home economics that went through six printings in four months when it appeared in 1929. The book's subtitle, A Bachelor Keeps House, reflects the fact that Cuppy never married. The crew at the nearby Zachs Inlet Coast Guard Station shared their food and recipes with Cuppy and helped him repair his shack.[11]
Encroachment by the new Jones Beach State Park forced Cuppy to abandon full-time residence on the island and return to New York's noise and soot. A special dispensation from New York's parks czar Robert Moses (1888–1981) let Cuppy keep his shack. He made regular visits to his place at the beach until the end of his life.[12]
From his Greenwich Village apartment, Cuppy continued to turn out magazine articles and books. He always worked from notes jotted on 3x5-inch index cards. Cuppy would amass hundreds of cards even for a short article. His friend and literary executor Fred Feldkamp (1914–1981) reported that Cuppy sometimes read more than 25 thick books on a subject before he wrote a single word about it.[13]
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https://www.ancestry.com/mediaui-viewer/tree/5352750/person/-1465620075/media/5cebf719-7891-4c44-bfed-36b404d23b0f 1932 promotional photo of Will Cuppy. | |
https://www.ancestry.com/mediaui-viewer/tree/5352750/person/-1465620075/media/d7fbf270-6065-478d-b010-beee6699e5f4 The link is to an image of Will Cuppy that appeared in John Towner Frederick's "Of Men and Books" radio program in 1942. | |
http://earchives.lib.purdue.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/earhart&CISOPTR=3585&CISOBOX=1&REC=4 The link is to an image of a telegram from Will Cuppy received by Amelia Earhart in London on May 22, 1932, after she flew solo across the Atlantic. |
Writing funny but factual magazine articles was Cuppy's real talent. He enjoyed a brief success in 1933 with a humorous talk show on NBC radio with actress and gourmet cook Jeanne Owen,[14] but he flopped on the lecture circuit.[15] Basically shy, Cuppy was happiest when he was rummaging through scholarly journals prizing out facts to copy out on his note cards. According to Feldkamp, one of Cuppy's favorite places was the Bronx Zoo, "where he felt really relaxed."[16]
Many of Cuppy's articles for The New Yorker and other magazines were later collected as books: How to Tell Your Friends from the Apes (1931); and How to Become Extinct (1941). Cuppy also edited three collections of mystery stories: World's Great Mystery Stories (1943); World's Great Detective Stories (1943); and Murder Without Tears (1946). His last animal book, How to Attract the Wombat, appeared two months after his death in 1949.
Cuppy's best-known work, a satire on history called The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody, was unfinished when he died. Its humor ranges from the remark that, when the Nile floods receded, the land, as far as the eye can see, is "covered by Egyptologists", to the detailed dissection, quotation, and parody, in the chapter on Alexander the Great, of the picture of Alexander as an idealist for world peace. The book's appeal can be gauged by the fact that CBS broadcaster Edward R. Murrow and his colleague Don Hollenbeck took turns reading from it on the air "until the announcer cracked up."[17]
The Decline and Fall was completed and published in 1950 by Fred Feldkamp, who sifted through nearly 15,000 of Cuppy's carefully filed note cards to get the book into print within a year of his friend's death. Feldkamp also edited a second posthumous volume, a comic almanac titled How to Get from January to December, that appeared in 1951.
Cuppy's last years were marked by poor physical health and increasing depression. Facing eviction from his apartment, he took an overdose of sleeping pills and died ten days later on September 19, 1949, at
Cuppy's cremated remains were returned to his hometown and buried in a grave next to his mother's in Evergreen Cemetery. His grave was unmarked until 1985, when local donors purchased a granite headstone with the inscription, "American Humorist". In 2003, Cuppy received another memorial when a committee of the International Astronomical Union approved the name "15017 Cuppy" for an asteroid.[19] In 2019, the Indiana Historical Bureau approved placing a state historic marker at Cuppy's family home in Auburn.[20]
Although Cuppy was reclusive and cultivated the image of a curmudgeon, he had many friends in New York's literary circles. One of them was the poet
He had the haunted look of the true humorist. All his friends loved him.[21]
Cuppy documents
Cuppy's papers, including thousands of his notecards, are archived at the University of Chicago Library.[22] A number of his letters to his friend and Herald Tribune colleague Isabel Paterson are among Paterson's papers archived at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum in West Branch, Iowa. [23] Two of Cuppy's letters to Max Eastman are among Eastman's papers at Indiana University's Lilly Library.[24] The Frank Sullivan Collection at Cornell University also contains correspondence from Cuppy.[25] The papers of John Towner Frederick at the University of Iowa include letters written by Cuppy in the 1940s relating to Frederick's Of Men and Books series for CBS Radio.[26] Four letters from Cuppy to children's author Anne Carroll Moore are among her papers at the New York Public Library[27]
Iranian controversy
A Persian translation by
Selected bibliography
- Books[29]
- (1951) How to Get from January to December, New York: Holt. Edited by Fred Feldkamp. Illustrations by John Ruge.
- (1950) The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody, New York: Holt. Edited by Fred Feldkamp. Illustrations by William Steig.
- (1949) How to Attract the Wombat, New York: Rinehart. Illustrations by Ed Nofziger.
- (1944) The Great Bustard and Other People (containing How to Tell Your Friends from the Apes and How to Become Extinct), New York : Murray Hill Books.
- (1941) How to Become Extinct, New York: Farrar and Rinehart. Illustrations by William Steig.
- (1931) How to Tell Your Friends from the Apes, New York: Horace Liveright, Inc. Introduction by P. G. Wodehouse. Illustrations by "Jacks."
- (1929) How to Be a Hermit, New York: Horace Liveright.
- (1910) Maroon Tales, Chicago: Forbes & Co..
- Books, edited
- (1946) Murder Without Tears: An Anthology of Crime, New York: Sheridan House.
- (1943) World's Great Detective Stories: American and English Masterpieces, New York, Cleveland: World.
- (1943) World's Great Mystery Stories: American and English Masterpieces, New York, Cleveland: World.
- Book, contributed footnotes
- (1937) Garden Rubbish and Other Country Bumps by W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman; with footnotes by Will Cuppy. New York: Farrar & Rinehart.
- Book containing articles by Will Cuppy
- (1948) The Home Book of Laughter, May Lamberton Becker (ed.), New York: Dodd, Mead.
- M.A. thesis completed at the University of Chicago
- (1914) The Elizabethan Conception of Prose Style.
- Book about Will Cuppy
- Gehring, Wes D. (2013). Will Cuppy, American Satirist. McFarland. ISBN 9780786469611.
- Gehring, Wes D. (2013). Will Cuppy, American Satirist. McFarland.
Notes and references
- 44th Regiment Indiana Infantry, was sent home to South Whitley, where he died July 15, 1862, age 26.
- ISBN 978-1-4391-7825-6
- ^ Cuppy described his mother as "a singer of great talent." While she sang in the choir of the Auburn Presbyterian Church, Will pumped the old-fashioned pipe organ, an experience that he said led to his membership in the "Guild of Former Pipe Organ Pumpers." Stanley Kunitz, Howard Haycraft and Wilbur Crane Hadden (eds.), Authors Today and Yesterday, New York: H.W. Wilson Co., 1933, p. 182. The Guild of Former Pipe Organ Pumpers was a real organization. Cuppy's framed certificate of membership, dated 1929, is among his papers at the University of Chicago Library. See Guide to the Will Cuppy Papers.
- ^ Stanley Kunitz and Howard Haycraft (eds.), Twentieth Century Authors, New York: H.W. Wilson Co., 1942, p.341.
- ^ 65 pages titled The Elizabethan Conception of Prose Style.
- ISBN 0-87923-514-4 Cuppy's draft registration card shows him working in 1918 for the Van Patten company, a prominent advertising firm located at 50 East 42nd Street in Manhattan. After Cuppy died, his long struggle to be a playwright was recalled by book columnist Harry Hansen who met him when they were students in Chicago: "About that time he told me he had begun a play, and in recent years he was still writing it." Harry Hansen (October 23, 1949). "About Will J. Cuppy". Chicago Tribune. Retrieved January 27, 2015.
- Armistice. See Historical Background of The World War I Draftfor a description of the registration system. Cuppy's official military service record shows that he was honorably discharged after serving less than a month, from October 28, 1918 to November 26, 1918, stationed in Washington, D.C. Ancestry.com. New York, Abstracts of World War I Military Service, 1917-1919 (database on-line). Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2013. Original data: New York (State). Adjutant General's Office. Abstracts of World War I Military Service, 1917–1919. Series B0808. New York State Archives, Albany, New York.
- ^ Rascoe, p. 179.
- ISBN 0-7658-0241-4Cuppy dedicated books to Paterson, but they had a falling-out in the 1940s and never reconciled. Cox, p. 344.
- ISBN 0-8103-1147-X
- ^ See generally, How to be a Hermit.
- ISBN 978-0-07-043489-9 The Coast Guard station was abandoned by 1934. [1]
- ^ Fred Feldkamp, Introduction to The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody, p. 2.
- John Towner Frederick's "Of Men and Books" radio program in 1942 to discuss mystery stories. Jo Ranson (January 23, 1942). "Radio Dial Log" (PDF). Brooklyn Eagle. Retrieved May 25, 2014.
- ^ Maeder, pp. 237–238; Kunitz and Haycraft, p. 342.
- ^ Feldkamp, p. 3.
- ISBN 9780810311473. Retrieved July 23, 2012.
- ISBN 978-0-7864-6961-1. A little over four years later, on November 9, 1953, the poet Dylan Thomasdied at St. Vincent's. The hospital closed in 2010.
- ISBN 3-642-01964-1
- ^ Bassett, Kathryn (June 16, 2019). "Historic marker to honor Auburn native Cuppy". The Star. Auburn, IN: KPC Media Group, Inc. pp. A2. Retrieved June 21, 2019.
- ^ Saturday Review of Literature, vol. XXX, no. 42, October 15, 1949, p. 40.
- ^ "Guide to the Will Cuppy Papers circa 1884-1949". www.lib.uchicago.edu.
- ^ Isabel M. Paterson Papers Box and Folder Inventory
- ^ "Eastman mss". www.indiana.edu. December 6, 2013.
- ^ "Guide to the Frank Sullivan Collection,1910-1972". rmc.library.cornell.edu.
- ^ "Papers of John Towner Frederick - Special Collections - The University of Iowa Libraries". www.lib.uiowa.edu.
- ^ Anne Carroll Moore Papers, New York Public Library, Humanities and Social Science Library, Manuscripts and Archives Division, Correspondence, 1898-1960. Retrieved 24 January 2014.
- ^ Reviews of the Persian-language translation may be found at Goodreads.com. Darybandari's translation is also listed in WorldCat.
- ^ Does not include reprinted editions.
External links
- Petri Liukkonen. "Will Cuppy". Books and Writers.
- WFYI "Across Indiana" segment on Will Cuppy
- Martin Gardner (1941). "Will Cuppy: An interview". University of Chicago Magazine. Retrieved April 25, 2014.
- Will Cuppy family history on RootsWeb.com