Woollcott, Alexander (1887–1943), critic. Born in Phalanx, New Jersey, and educated at Hamilton College, he served as a police reporter for the
New York Times before becoming one of its drama critics in 1914. With time off for World War I, he remained at the paper until 1922, when he wrote for the
Herald, then the
Sun, and finally the
World. His fellow critic, John Mason
Brown, called him “a sizzling mixture of arsenic and treacle,” and said “he was as warm in his resentments as in his enthusiasms . . . his daily reviews . . . may not have been criticism but they were performances, Woollcott performing so that the emotions of a first night were captured in print with an immediacy unmatched in our time.” He wrote paeans of praise on Mrs.
Fiske and the
Marx Brothers but detested many of Eugene
O'Neill's best plays. His books, often filled with theatrical criticism and reminiscences, included
Mrs. Fiske (1917),
Mr. Dickens Goes to the Play (1923),
Enchanted Aisles (1924),
The Story of Irving Berlin (1925),
Going to Pieces (1928),
While Rome Burns (1934), and
Long, Long Ago (1943). With George S.
Kaufman he wrote two failed plays,
The Channel Road (1929) and
The Dark Tower (1933). In his last years he devoted himself largely to radio and to writing magazine articles but also took time to appear in
Brief Moment (1931) and
Wine of Choice (1938), and in 1940 headed the road company of
The Man Who Came to Dinner, playing Sheridan Whiteside, a character drawn after his own image. Biography:
Smart Aleck, Howard Teichmann, 1978.
