Books: A Scribe from Harvard ’10

Heywood Broun: A Biography By Richard O’Connor Putnam, 249 pp., $8.95 In the parlance of modern job placement specialists, the “flair factor” in Heywood Broun’s career was an ability to turn out a column-length personal essay in forty minutes and less. The knack helped Broun to become one of the most famous and influential journalists of his day—the 1920s and ’30s —although now he is chiefly remembered as a minor character in the biographies of the men and women with whom he lunched at the Algonquin’s Round Table.

Broun’s genius was daily journalism, and his immense reputation began to yellow and fade almost from the moment of his death in December 1939. Few people are now curious to know what the columnist’s son, Heywood Hale Broun, ate for breakfast in 1927 —although followers of young Broun’s radio program are still kept abreast of his current diet.

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Whit Stillman

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Heywood Broun: A Biography By Richard O’Connor Putnam, 249 pp., $8.95 In the parlance of modern job placement specialists, the “flair factor” in Heywood Broun’s career was an ability to turn out a column-length personal essay in forty minutes and less. The knack helped Broun to become one of the most famous and influential journalists of his day—the 1920s and ’30s —although now he is chiefly remembered as a minor character in the biographies of the men and women with whom he lunched at the Algonquin’s Round Table.

Broun’s genius was daily journalism, and his immense reputation began to yellow and fade almost from the moment of his death in December 1939. Few people are now curious to know what the columnist’s son, Heywood Hale Broun, ate for breakfast in 1927 —although followers of young Broun’s radio program are still kept abreast of his current diet.