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Wilfred J. Funk
Wilfred John Funk (March 20, 1883 – June 1, 1965) was an American writer, poet, lexicographer and publisher. He was president of Funk & Wagnalls from 1925 to 1940, and founded the publishing company Wilfred Funk, Inc. Personal life Funk was the only son of Funk & Wagnalls' founder Isaac Kaufmann Funk. He graduated from Princeton in 1909, and joined the family firm. He married Eleanor Hawkins on July 29, 1915. He had a wealthy lifestyle. His main residence was in Montclair, New Jersey, a suburb of Manhattan. His beach house "Cobble Court" in Southampton was a society venue in the Hamptons summer season. Several tax-efficient trusts Funk created for his wife were the subject of dispute with the Tax Office, ending in a Court of Appeals decision in 1950. His son Wilfred J. Funk, Jr was killed in August 1943 in Operation Cottage, the assault on Kiska in World War II. Wilfred Funk died of arteriosclerosis in Montclair. Early work Funk became president of Funk & Wagnalls in 1 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Montclair, New Jersey
Montclair () is a township in Essex County in the U.S. state of New Jersey. Situated on the cliffs of the Watchung Mountains, Montclair is a wealthy and diverse commuter town and suburb of New York City within the New York metropolitan area. As of the 2020 U.S. census, the township's population was 40,921, reflecting an increase of 3,234 (+8.5%) from the 37,687 counted in the 2010 Census. As of 2010, it was the 60th-most-populous municipality in New Jersey. Montclair was first formed as a township on April 15, 1868, from portions of Bloomfield Township, so that a second railroad could be built to Montclair. After a referendum held on February 21, 1894, Montclair was reincorporated as a town, effective February 24, 1894.Snyder, John P''The Story of New Jersey's Civil Boundaries: 1606–1968'' Bureau of Geology and Topography; Trenton, New Jersey; 1969. p. 129. Accessed July 6, 2012. It derives its name from the French ''mont clair'', meaning "clear mountain" or "bright mounta ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Light Verse
Light poetry or light verse is poetry that attempts to be humorous. Light poems are usually brief, can be on a frivolous or serious subject, and often feature word play including puns, adventurous rhyme, and heavy alliteration. Typically, light verse in English is formal verse, although a few free verse poets have excelled at light verse outside the formal verse tradition. While light poetry is sometimes condemned as doggerel or thought of as poetry composed casually, humor often makes a serious point in a subtle or subversive way. Many of the most renowned "serious" poets, such as Horace, Swift, Pope, and Auden, also excelled at light verse. Notable poets English * Richard Armour * Max Beerbohm * Hilaire Belloc * John Betjeman * Morris Bishop * Lord Byron * C. S. Calverley * Lewis Carroll * Charles E. Carryl * Brian P. Cleary * William Rossa Cole * Wendy Cope * Noël Coward * Alma Denny * Henry Austin Dobson * T. S. Eliot * Willard R. Espy * Gavin Ewart * Charles Ghigna * ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cliché
A cliché ( or ) is an element of an artistic work, saying, or idea that has become overused to the point of losing its original meaning or effect, even to the point of being weird or irritating, especially when at some earlier time it was considered meaningful or novel. In phraseology, the term has taken on a more technical meaning, referring to an expression imposed by conventionalized linguistic usage. The term is often used in modern culture for an action or idea that is expected or predictable, based on a prior event. Typically pejorative, "clichés" may or may not be true. Some are stereotypes, but some are simply truisms and facts. Clichés often are employed for comedic effect, typically in fiction. Most phrases now considered clichéd originally were regarded as striking but have lost their force through overuse. The French poet Gérard de Nerval once said, "The first man who compared woman to a rose was a poet, the second, an imbecile." A cliché is often a vivid d ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gene Buck
Edward Eugene Buck (August 7, 1885 – February 24, 1957) was an American illustrator of sheet music, musical theater lyricist, and president of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP). Early career Buck was born in Detroit, growing up in Corktown. He studied at Detroit Art Academy, which had been founded by Joseph Gies and Francis P. Paulus. He illustrated for music publishers Ted Snyder, Edward H. Pfeiffer, and Jerome H. Remick. His cover illustrations had a personal touch and showed art deco and art nouveau elements. Dean Cornwell called him "the first artist I ever copied". By 1910 Buck was writing lyrics for composer Dave Stamper; his first hit was "Daddy has a Sweetheart, and Mother is her Name". He wrote about 500 songs, including "In the Cool of the Evening", "No Foolin'", "Garden of My Dreams", "Someone, Someday, Somewhere", and "Hello, 'Frisco". After 1914 he gave up illustration due to his failing eyesight. Ziegfeld Buck collaborated with ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
George Ade
George Ade (February 9, 1866 – May 16, 1944) was an American writer, syndicated newspaper columnist, and playwright who gained national notoriety at the turn of the 20th century with his "Stories of the Streets and of the Town", a column that used street language and slang to describe daily life in Chicago, and a column of his fables in slang, which were humorous stories that featured vernacular speech and the liberal use of capitalization in his characters' dialog. Ade's fables in slang gained him wealth and fame as an American humorist, as well as earning him the nickname of the "Aesop of Indiana". His notable early books include ''Artie'' (1896); ''Pink Marsh'' (1897); ''Fables in Slang'' (1900), the first in a series of books; and ''In Babel'' (1903), a collection of his short stories. His first play produced for the Broadway stage was ''The Sultan of Sulu'', written in 1901. ''The Sho-Gun'' and his best-known plays, '' The County Chairman'' and '' The College Widow'', were ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gelett Burgess
Frank Gelett Burgess (January 30, 1866 – September 18, 1951) was an American artist, art critic, poet, author and humorist. An important figure in the San Francisco Bay Area literary renaissance of the 1890s, particularly through his iconoclastic little magazine, ''The Lark'', he is best known as a writer of nonsense verse, such as " The Purple Cow," and for introducing French modern art to the United States in an essay titled "The Wild Men of Paris." He was the author of the popular Goops books, and he coined the term "blurb." Early life Born in Boston, Burgess was "raised among staid, conservative New England gentry". He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, graduating with a B.S. in 1887. After graduation, Burgess fled conservative Boston for the livelier bohemia of San Francisco, where he worked as a draftsman for the Southern Pacific Railroad. In 1891, he was hired by the University of California at Berkeley as an instructor of topographical drawing. Cog ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Damon Runyon
Alfred Damon Runyon (October 4, 1880 – December 10, 1946) was an American newspaperman and short-story writer. He was best known for his short stories celebrating the world of Broadway in New York City that grew out of the Prohibition era. To New Yorkers of his generation, a "Damon Runyon character" evoked a distinctive social type from Brooklyn or Midtown Manhattan. The adjective "Runyonesque" refers to this type of character and the type of situations and dialog that Runyon depicts. He spun humorous and sentimental tales of gamblers, hustlers, actors, and gangsters, few of whom go by "square" names, preferring instead colorful monikers such as "Nathan Detroit", "Benny Southstreet", "Big Jule", "Harry the Horse", "Good Time Charley", "Dave the Dude", or "The Seldom Seen Kid". His distinctive vernacular style is known as "Runyonese": a mixture of formal speech and colorful slang, almost always in the present tense, and always devoid of contractions. He is credited with co ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ring Lardner
Ringgold Wilmer Lardner (March 6, 1885 – September 25, 1933) was an American sports columnist and short story writer best known for his satirical writings on sports, marriage, and the theatre. His contemporaries Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, and F. Scott Fitzgerald all professed strong admiration for his writing, and author John O'Hara directly attributed his understanding of dialogue to him. Work Syndicated writing Lardner started his writing career as a sports columnist, finding work with the newspaper '' South Bend Times'' in 1905. In 1907, he relocated to Chicago, where he got a job with the '' Inter-Ocean''. Within a year, he quit to work for the ''Chicago Examiner'', and then for the ''Tribune''. Two years later, Lardner was in St. Louis, writing the humorous baseball column ''Pullman Pastimes'' for Taylor Spink and the ''Sporting News''. Some of this work was the basis for his book ''You Know Me Al''. Within three months, he was an employee of the ''Boston ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Arthur "Bugs" Baer
bugs ate bugs and was chump Early life Baer was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the seventh of 14 children born to immigrants from Alsace-Lorraine. He left school at age 14 to work, attended art school, and designed lace on a wage of $12 a week. One article from 1918 lists Baer as a notable graduate of the Field Artillery Officers' Training School in Camp Zachary Taylor. Baer also contributed to the 1919 book ''F.A.C.O.T.S. - The Story of the Field Artillery Central Officers Training School''. A 1921 article shows that Baer played on the New York Newspaper Golf Club team in an intercity New York-Boston journalists' golf match. Career Baer began his career in journalism as an artist with the ''Philadelphia Public Ledger'' and later worked for other papers before working as a sports journalist for the ''Washington Times'', where he drew cartoons of a "baseball-bodied insect" named "Bugs." Baer was thereafter known as "Bugs," insisting upon being referred to by this nickn ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Walter Winchell
Walter Winchell (April 7, 1897 – February 20, 1972) was a syndicated American newspaper gossip columnist and radio news commentator. Originally a vaudeville performer, Winchell began his newspaper career as a Broadway reporter, critic and columnist for New York Tabloid (newspaper format), tabloids. He rose to national celebrity in the 1930s with Hearst Communications, Hearst newspaper chain syndication and a popular radio program. He was known for an innovative style of gossipy staccato news briefs, jokes and Jazz Age slang. Biographer Neal Gabler claimed that his popularity and influence "turned journalism into a form of entertainment". He uncovered both Infotainment#Journalism, hard news and embarrassing stories about famous people by exploiting his exceptionally wide circle of contacts, first in the entertainment world and the Prohibition in the United States, Prohibition era underworld, then in law enforcement and politics. He was known for trading gossip, sometimes in re ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tad Dorgan
Thomas Aloysius Dorgan (April 29, 1877 – May 2, 1929), also known as Tad Dorgan, was an American cartoonist who signed his drawings as Tad. He is known for his cartoon panel ''Indoor Sports'' and comic strip ''Judge Rummy'', as well as the many English words and expressions he coined or popularized. Early life Dorgan was born in San Francisco on April 29, 1877. He was one of at least 11 children—six sons and five daughters – of Thomas J. and Anna Dorgan. His brother John L. "Ike" Dorgan (born April 1879) was publicity manager for the Madison Square Garden, and his brother Richard W. "Dick" Dorgan (born September 1892) was an illustrator and cartoonist. Polytechnic High School teachers Rosey Murdoch and Maria Van Vieck recognized and encouraged Tad's talent as an artist. When Dorgan was a child, he lost several fingers of his right hand in an accident whose details are unclear; ''Cosmopolitan'' writer O. O. McIntyre — a friend of Dorgan's — wrote that when Dorgan "wa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sime Silverman
Simon J. Silverman (May 19, 1873 – September 22, 1933) was an American journalist and newspaper publisher. He was the founder of the weekly newspaper ''Variety'' in New York City in 1905, which gave theatre and vaudeville reviews and the Hollywood-based ''Daily Variety'' magazine in 1933, focusing on the emerging motion picture film industry. Early life Silverman was born to an American Jewish family on May 19, 1873 in Cortland, New York. His father, Louis J. Silverman, was a businessman. Career Silverman began his career by working for his father. In 1903, he became a journalist for the ''Daily America'' and wrote under the pen name "The Man in the Third Row". After the ''Daily America'' dissolved, he later joined the New York-based ''The Morning Telegraph'' but was fired in 1905 for a notice on a new sketch played by Mrs. Stuart Robson at Proctor's 58th Street theatre where the review mentioned the sketch was n.g. (no good). He was not aware that Mrs. Robson had given the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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