Author Adams Franklin Pierce

il, Adams wrote what remains his best known work, Baseball's Sad Lexicon, a tribute to the Chicago Cubs double play combination of "Tinker to Evers to Chance". During World War I, Adams was in the U.S. Army, assigned to the military newspaper Stars and Stripes, where he worked with Harold Ross, Alexander Woollcott and other literary lights of the 1920s. After the war, the so-called "comma-hunter of Park Row"[2] (for his knowledge of the language) returned to New York and the Tribune. He moved to the New York World in 1922, and his column appeared there until the paper merged with the inferior New York Telegram in 1931. He returned to his old paper, by then called the New York Herald Tribune, until 1937, and finally moved to the New York Post, where he ended his column in September 1941. During its long run, "The Conning Tower" publicized the work of such writers as Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker, George S. Kaufman, Moss Hart, Edna Ferber and Deems Taylor. Having one's work published in "The Conning Tower" was enough to launch a career, as in the case of Dorothy Parker and James Thurber. Parker quipped, "He raised me from a couplet." Much later, the writer E.B. White freely admitted his sense of awe: "I used to walk quickly past the house in West 13th Street between Sixth and Seventh where F.P.A. lived, and the block seemed to tremble under my feet—the way Park Avenue trembles when a train leaves Grand Central."[3] FPA often included parodies in his column. His satire of Edgar Allan Poe's poem "Annabel Lee" was later collected in his book Something Else Again (1910): As a panelist on the radio's Information Please (1938-48), he was the designated expert on poetry, old bar-room songs and Gilbert and Sullivan, which he always referred to as Sullivan and Gilbert. A running joke on the show was that his stock answer for quotes that he didn't know was that Shakespeare was the author. (Perhaps that was a running gag: Information Please's creator/producer Dan Golenpaul auditioned Adams for the job with a series of sample questions, starting with: "Who was the Merchant of Venice?" Adams: "Antonio." Golenpaul: "Most people would say 'Shylock.'" Adams: "Not in my circle."[4]) John Kieran was the real Shakespearean expert and could quote from his works at length. Adams was portrayed by the actor Chip Zien in the 1994 film Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle.[5] His books include Tobogganning on Parnassus (1911) and Answer This One (a 1927 trivia book with Harry Hansen). His final volume, The Melancholy Lute (1936), featured Adams' selections from three decades of his work. He also was a translator of Horace and other classical authors, and he collaborated with O. Henry on Lo, a musical comedy. "I find that a great part of the information I have was acquired by looking up something and finding something else on the way." "To err is human; to forgive, infrequent." "Elections are won by men and women chiefly because most people vote against somebody rather than for somebody."