Bohemians, Bootleggers, Flappers, and Swells: The Best of Early Vanity Fair

by Unknown

  LANGSTON HUGHES (1902–1967) was an American poet, fiction writer, lecturer, essayist, editor, and social activist who pioneered jazz poetry and helped spearhead the Harlem Renaissance.

  ALDOUS HUXLEY (1894–1963) was a British writer, essayist, and humanist best known for his dystopian novel Brave New World and for The Doors of Perception, his memoir about his experiences under the influence of hallucinogens. Huxley died on November 22, 1963, the day of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination.

  MAX JACOB (1876–1944) was a French writer, painter, and critic whose poetry was said to bridge the gap between symbolism and surrealism. He died of pneumonia in France’s Drancy internment camp after being apprehended by the Gestapo in 1944.

  ALVA JOHNSTON (1888–1950) was an American journalist and sometime Vanity Fair contributor. A writer for the Sacramento Bee, the New York Times, and the New York Herald, Johnston won a Pulitzer Prize in 1923 “for his reports of the proceedings of the convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.”

  GEOFFREY KERR (1895–1971), a combat veteran of World War I, was a British screenwriter, playwright, and occasional actor whose career spanned silent films and the talkies.

  JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES (1883–1946) was a British economist whose principles of macroeconomics and advocacy of state-sanctioned stimulus measures after World War II made him one of the era’s most influential financial theorists. Keynes was also the director of the Bank of England and a member of the Bloomsbury Group.

  D. H. LAWRENCE (1885–1930) was an English writer, poet, and essayist who broke new literary ground with novels, such as Sons and Lovers, Women in Love, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The writer E. M. Forster once labeled him “the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation.”

  STEPHEN LEACOCK (1869–1944) was a Canadian humorist, essayist, and novelist who contributed more than fifty columns to Vanity Fair, often satirizing upper-class mores. Following his death, a Canadian postage stamp was released in his honor and the Leacock Medal for Humour was established, an annual award celebrating Canadian levity in letters.

  WALTER LIPPMANN (1889–1974) was an American newsman and intellectual who wrote essays for Vanity Fair throughout the 1920s and 1930s. A nationally syndicated columnist, Lippmann is said to have popularized the term “cold war” and earned Pulitzer Prizes for Commentary and for International Reporting.

  THOMAS MANN (1875–1955) was a German novelist whose works such as Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain, and Death in Venice placed him at the forefront of mid-twentieth-century European letters. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929; seven years later the German government revoked his citizenship because of his public criticism of Hitler’s regime.

  EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY (1892–1950) was an American poet and playwright whose verse, according to the poet Richard Wilbur, contained “some of the best sonnets of the century.” She won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1923 and continued to write satirical essays for Vanity Fair under the pseudonym Nancy Boyd throughout the twenties.

  A. A. MILNE (1882–1956) was a British writer, playwright, and humorist acclaimed for his series of poems and stories about Christopher Robin and Winnie-the-Pooh, which are regarded as classics of children’s literature.

  HELEN BROWN NORDEN (1908–1982) was an American journalist and critic who contributed to Vanity Fair during the 1930s. A mistress of Condé Nast, the publisher of Vogue and Vanity Fair, Norden created a stir in 1936 when Esquire published her article “Latins Are Lousy Lovers.”

  ANNE O’HAGAN (1869–1934) was an early contributor to Vanity Fair, Munsey’s Magazine, and the Century Magazine. Her writing was marked by its strong social conscience, most memorably, perhaps, for her chapter in The Sturdy Oak, a composite novel sold to benefit the suffragette movement.

  DOROTHY ROTHSCHILD PARKER (1893–1967) was a staff writer and drama critic for Vanity Fair from 1917 to 1920; the magazine ran her first published poem in 1915, when she was twenty-two years old. Known for her lacerating wit, Parker, a mainstay of the Algonquin Round Table, was a poet, humorist, short story writer, civil rights activist, and screenwriter. (She received Oscar nominations for her work on A Star Is Born and Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman.)

  E. M. ROBERTS was an American pilot whose memoir, A Flying Fighter, recounted his days as a World War I aviator in Britain’s Royal Flying Corps.

  BERTRAND RUSSELL (1872–1970) was a British philosopher, social critic, mathematician, and essayist who is considered one of the founders of analytic philosophy. Russell was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950 “in recognition of his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought.”

  CARL SANDBURG (1878–1967) was an American poet, historian, novelist, and journalist who won three Pulitzer Prizes, the first in 1919 for his poetry collection Cornhuskers, the second in 1940 for his four-volume biography, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years, and the third in 1951 for The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg. Sandburg, who wrote a biography of Vanity Fair photographer Edward Steichen, was married to Steichen’s sister Lillian.

  WILLIAM SAROYAN (1908–1981) was an Armenian American playwright whose works often explored the immigrant experience in America. Saroyan won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1940 (for his play The Time of Your Life) and a 1943 Academy Award for the film based on his novel The Human Comedy. A statue of Saroyan stands in Yerevan, Armenia, where half of his ashes are buried; the other half are interred in Fresno, California.

  CHARLES G. SHAW (1892–1974) was an American painter and critic who played a major role in the development of abstract art in America. An occasional contributor to Vanity Fair and the New Yorker during the Jazz Age, Shaw did not begin painting until he was well into his thirties.

  ROBERT E. SHERWOOD (1896–1955), a Vanity Fair contributor in the teens, was an American playwright, screenwriter, and a member of the Algonquin Round Table. He had several successful screenplays to his credit (including Rebecca, The Best Years of Our Lives, and The Bishop’s Wife) and served as a speechwriter for President Franklin D. Roosevelt, an experience that helped shape Sherwood’s Pulitzer Prize–winning history, Roosevelt and Hopkins.

  GERTRUDE STEIN (1874–1946), an experimental American poet, novelist, and memoirist, contributed poetry and essays to Vanity Fair, her early verse appearing while she volunteered as an ambulance driver during World War I. For nearly four decades, Stein’s Paris home served as a salon for some of the greatest literary and artistic minds of the early twentieth century. Stein’s memoir of those years, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, was a literary and cultural sensation.

  HYMAN STRUNSKY a short story writer, contributed essays to Vanity Fair in the 1910s.

  ARTHUR SYMONS (1865–1945) was a British poet, critic, and a cofounder of the short-lived literary magazine the Savoy. Symons’s monograph The Symbolist Movement in Literature is considered to have greatly influenced the early modernist poets.

  ALLENE TALMEY (1903–1986) was the managing editor of Vanity Fair before becoming an associate editor and columnist for Vogue.

  DARWIN L. TEILHET (1904–1964) was an American novelist and screenwriter whose most popular detective novels followed the adventures of one Baron von Kaz. His children’s book The Avion My Uncle Flew—which he wrote under the pseudonym Cyrus Fisher—received a Newbery Honor in 1947.

  DALTON TRUMBO (1905–1976) was an American screenwriter, novelist (Johnny Got His Gun), and a member of the Hollywood Ten, the group of movie insiders who, in 1947, refused to testify in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee about alleged Communist infiltration of the motion picture industry. Blacklisted for more than a decade, Trumbo (Kitty Foyle, Roman Holiday, The Brave One, Spartacus, Exodus, The Sandpiper, Papillon) was often forced to use a pseudonym, only belatedly receiving recognition for his work.

  STANLEY WALKER (1898–1962) was an American journalist and the
city editor of the New York Herald Tribune from 1928 to 1935. In his memoir City Editor, Walker wrote of the ideal newsman: “When he dies, a lot of people are sorry, and some of them remember him for several days.”

  HUGH WALPOLE (1884–1941) was a New Zealand–born British novelist known for his bestselling The Herries Chronicle. He enjoyed great literary and commercial success in his day and worked on the screenplays for the 1930s film versions of David Copperfield and Little Lord Fauntleroy. The essay published here on W. Somerset Maugham was an homage; Maugham, however, would later muddy Walpole’s reputation by using him as a model for the self-absorbed, social-climbing protagonist in his novel Cakes and Ale.

  WALTER WINCHELL (1897–1972) was an American radio personality and the country’s first nationally syndicated gossip columnist. Famously ornery, Winchell earned notoriety for his vicious attacks on those he viewed as rivals. He would later narrate the popular television series The Untouchables.

  P. G. WODEHOUSE (1881–1975), a frequent columnist and drama critic for Vanity Fair, was a humorist, playwright, journalist, novelist, and occasional lyricist. So prolific was Wodehouse during his V.F. tenure that he often contributed several pieces per issue, using pseudonyms such as Pelham Grenville, P. Brooke-Haven (after the Long Island town), and C. P. West (for Central Park West). Today, he is best remembered for his prize literary creations: the indelible British duo Bertie Wooster and his valet, Jeeves.

  THOMAS WOLFE (1900–1938) was an American novelist who achieved distinction as an epic stylist in works such as Look Homeward, Angel, and Of Time and the River, both of which focused on life in Asheville, North Carolina. One of his most popular novels, You Can’t Go Home Again, was published after Wolfe’s death, at age thirty-seven, from complications related to tuberculosis.

  ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT (1887–1943) was an American critic, commentator, and actor, as well as a frequent contributor to the New York Times, the New York Herald, Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, and other publications. A member of the Algonquin Round Table, and the basis for the character Sheridan Whiteside in the George S. Kauffman–Moss Hart play The Man Who Came to Dinner, Woollcott died of a cerebral hemorrhage shortly after suffering a heart attack on live radio.