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Biography of
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The 1880 United States census lists a Moses Adams (single, 30 years old, dry goods merchant) boarding with the Eberhardt family in Chicago, Illinois. Early the following year he married Clara Schlossman, and their first child, Franklin Leopold Adams, was born on November 15, 1881. It was not until he was thirteen years old, when he was confirmed at Sinai Temple, that Frank Adams changed his middle name to Pierce, after the 14th United States president, Franklin Pierce. In later life he signed his newspapers columns with the initials FPA. FPA's poem "Memories" is a delightful vignette of life in Chicago in 1892, from the perspective of a 10 year-old boy.
These are the things I used to know:
A book called " Remember the Alamo,"
Written, I think, by Amelia Barr;
And the Cottage Grove cable car --
It was purple, but the State Street car was red
That passed by the bakery of Livingston's bread.
In our yard, by the drying shirts and socks,
I planted nasturtiums and four-o'clocks,
And in winter I often used to glide
On Johnny Cudahy's toboggan slide --
(He had a pair of pants with stripes,
And lived just across from the Conrad Seipps).
And Toots McCormick and Alma Meyer
Yelled when I passed on my Barnes White Flyer;
And a thousand other things I knew
In that sweet Chicago of '92.
FPA's memory may have been a little shaky -- the Barnes Cycle Company, of Syracuse, New York, appears to have been in business only from 1895 to 1899, a bit too late for a bicycle ridden in 1892. But other details are accurate -- the Conrad Seipp Brewing Company sold beer from 1854 to 1933, the Cudahy family owned a meat-packing business, and the Chicago City Railway had a Wabash/Cottage Grove Avenue line. Joe Thompson's fine web site on cable cars has a wealth on information on the cable cars of Chicago as well as other cities. Here is a Chicago postcard from his collection, reproduced here with permission, which confirms FPA's memory that the State Street car was red:
FPA attended public primary school at Douglas School in Chicago, on the SE corner of Forest Avenue and 32nd Street, and high school at the private Armour Institute, on the corner of Armour (now Federal) Avenue and 33rd Street (today part of the campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology), where he acquired a solid grounding in the Latin language and from which he graduated in 1899.
FPA spent one year at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, but financial difficulties at home forced him to cut short his college career (he was later awarded an honorary degree). He returned to Chicago and started selling insurance to help out his family, as an agent with the Equitable Life Assurance Society (still in business today). One of his first customers was newspaper columnist, humorist, and playwright George Ade, whose example inspired FPA to try his hand at journalism. He first appeared in print with humorous verses in the "Poets' Corner" of the Chicago Journal, and he published a slim volume of his poems in 1902 under the title In Cupid's Court. In 1903 he quit his job as an insurance salesman and took a position as columnist with the Chicago Tribune.
In 1904, FPA moved to New York City, where he began his long career as a columnist with various New York newspapers:
His early columns had various different titles, but the title he chose at the New York Tribune, "The Conning Tower," stuck until the end of his career. A "conning tower" is the raised structure on a submarine, used for navigation, and from his vantage point at "The Connning Tower," FPA dispensed his witty, urbane observations on literature, society, and current events in a widely-read daily column.
FPA welcomed readers to send in their (unpaid) contributions, usually light verse, and he published many of these in "The Conning Tower." This was a way for new voices on the literary scene to make themselves quickly heard, and many writers, later well-known, owed their first appearance in print to FPA, arbiter of elegance. He boasted of Dorothy Parker that he had "raised her from a couplet," and other up-and-coming literary stars promoted by FPA included Robert Benchley, James Thurber, Eugene O'Neill, and E.B. White. Morrie Ryskind (1895-1985), who wrote scripts for the Marx Brothers movies along with George S. Kaufman, wrote about FPA:
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.But others were not pleased to come under FPA's scrutiny. He ridiculed the many spelling errors in F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel This Side of Paradise, for which Fitzgerald never forgave him -- he always referred to FPA afterwards as "that horse's ass."
Outside of his column, FPA's own literary ambitions were modest. He made a brief foray into musical comedy, collaborating with O. Henry (1862-1910) and composer A. Baldwin Sloane (1872-1926) in Lo, which had an undistinguished run in small theaters in the Midwest in 1909. Almost all of his books consist of prose and poetry reprinted from his newspaper column.
FPA was one of the members of the Algonquin Round Table, a group of wits who met for lunch during the 1920's at the Algonquin Hotel (59 West 44th Street) in New York City. Some other members of the group were:
An offshoot of the Algonquin Roundtable was a poker club called the Thanatopsis Pleasure and Inside Straight Club, shown in this caricature by Will Cotton (1880-1958), commissioned by Paul Hyde Bonner and now in a private collection. FPA is seated at the left, smoking a cigar.
Films about the Algonquin Round Table include:
From 1938 to 1948, FPA was a panelist on the popular radio show "Information, Please!" The host of the show was Clifton Fadiman, who asked panelists questions sent in by listeners. Along with FPA, other regular panelists were pianist Oskar Levant and sports writer John Kieran. If the panelists could not answer a question correctly, the questioner won a set of encyclopedias. It is estimated that "Information, Please!" reached a peak radio audience of nine million listeners. Some of my family members (born in the 1920s) still remember FPA from this show.
Many of the Information, Please! shows are available from Fair Pickings on audio cassette or CD.
FPA was married twice, to showgirl Minna Schwartze (from 1904 to 1924) and to socialite Esther Root (from 1925 to about 1950). Both marriages ended in divorce.
FPA had no children by his first marriage, but his second marriage produced four -- Anthony ("Tat"), Timothy ("Tim"), Persephone ("Puff"), and Jonathan ("Jack"). Despite some tender poems written about his children, FPA was by all reports a distant, aloof father. One of his children later said, "If you read the Tower, you knew him as well as we did."
An important figure in his day, FPA is now almost totally forgotten. Every single one of his books is out of print.