From F.P.A., the Life and Times of Franklin Pierce Adams by Sally Ashley (1986):
As the months passed, the top of Frank’s rolltop desk became cluttered with clippings and newspapers, notebooks, and bits of paper, half-finished verses and cascades of mail from readers. As he worked, he smoked big black cigars and ashes fell everywhere, including all over his clothes, speckling them with little brown holes. His was an untidy mien, although he was unexpectedly fastidious, as when he compulsively scrutinized the column over the linotyper’s shoulder to catch last-minute mistakes, or displayed an intense concern with its cosmetics, how it looked with different sized type, boxes, italics, printer’s symbols, its paragraphs and verses clustered with an eye to attractive arrangement. He always filled his fountain pen with green ink and wrote his copy painstakingly with a distinctive wedding invitation handwriting. (p. 63)
In 1920, thirty-nine-year-old F.P.A.’s unique fame soared, more than the sum of its parts. Fifty years later Groucho Marx remembered that “in those days we all tried to get a piece into his column. When I finally got a little piece in it, just a little one, not more than an inch, I thought I was Shakespeare.” Morrie Riskind, who, with George S. Kaufman, wrote the scripts for the hilarious Marx Brothers movies, said, “It would be almost impossible [now] to realize the influence Frank Adams had in New York at that time. If Frank recommended a book, people bought the book. If he recommended a show, you went to see the show. He had a tremendous influence. It was the thing everybody read. You could become well known just by getting your name in there.” And after nurturing by F.P.A., a grateful John O’ Hara dedicated his first novel, Appointment in Samarra, “To F.P.A.” (p. 117)
F.P.A. easily tired of phonies and blowhards. One evening at dinner when Ellis Lardner asked him the kind of person he preferred, he answered, “People without pretense.” He took every opportunity to ridicule the self-righteous or those who pretended to know right from wrong in murky matters of the heart. “What has taken all our waking time,” he wrote, “is the compilation of a list of Ten Lists of ‘Ten Books I Enjoyed Most’ I enjoyed most. Thus far our favorite list is that of Professor Stuart P. Sherman. He says he enjoys Boswell’s Life of Johnson and Milton’s Samson Agonistes. Now, it takes all kinds of readers to make a world, and among them may be those who ‘enjoy’ Boswell; but it seems to us that anybody who says he ‘enjoys’ Samson Agonistes would rather do calisthenics in the bathroom mornings than play golf or tennis. To our unbigoted notion any list of Enjoyable Books that fails to include Davy and the Goblin is just ridiculous. … Reading of most of these lists leads to the conviction that they should be entitled ‘Ten Books I Want People to Think I Enjoyed Most.'” (p. 165)
…one morning he suggested that Hitler’s calendar should omit the months of “Jewn” and “Jewly.” (p. 201)
IWP BOOKS 