Channing Pollock

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Pollock, Channing (1880–1946), playwright and critic. Born in Washington, D.C., but raised in Omaha and Salt Lake City, his theatrical career began when he returned to his birthplace to become a drama critic for the Washington Post and later for the Times and the Dramatic Mirror. After working as a publicist for Florenz Ziegfeld, William A. Brady, and the Shuberts, he turned to playwriting, experiencing a quick failure with his The Game of Hearts (1903), but later that year he scored his initial success with his dramatization of Frank Norris's muckraking novel, The Pit. Alone or with collaborators Pollock wrote about thirty shows that saw the footlights, ranging from sketches for several Ziegfeld Follies and the books of musical comedies to farce and melodrama. Among his early works were Clothes (1906), Such a Little Queen (1909), The Crowded Hour (1918), Roads of Destiny (1918), and The Sign on the Door (1919). During this period he continued to write drama criticism, some of which so antagonized his former employers, the Shuberts, that they barred him from their theatres. Pollock's career took a marked turn in 1922 with The Fool. His remaining works could all be perceived as contemporary morality plays: The Enemy (1925), Mr. Moneypenny (1928), and The House Beautiful (1931). Critics were increasingly put off by the preachiness of his last plays and grew steadily unkind, which prompted Pollock to retire. Autobiography: Harvest of My Years, 1943.

Pollock, Channing (1880–1946), born in Washington, D.C., became a New York journalist and dramatic critic, and began his career as a playwright with an adaption of Norris's The Pit (1900). This was followed by a long series of farces, melodramas, and musical comedy librettos, but in 1922 he turned to the thesis drama with The Fool, about a modern minister who attempts to emulate the career of Christ. The Enemy (1925), another homiletic play, is a plea for pacifism, set in Austria at the beginning of World War I. Mr. Moneypenny (1928) is an allegory of a wage slave who sells his soul to the modern devil, Mr. Moneypenny, for wealth, but eventually returns to his original poverty and honesty. The House Beautiful (1931), another allegory, is about a clerk whose wife thinks him a modern Galahad. The critical disapproval of these plays led Pollock to retire from the theater. His later books include The Adventures of a Happy Man (1939), Guide Posts in Chaos (1942), and Harvest of My Years (1943), an autobiography.