Benchley

It's the birthday of humorist, actor, and drama critic Robert Benchley (1889) (books by this author), born in Worcester, Massachusetts. When he was nine, his older brother, Edmund, was killed in the Spanish-American War. His mother cried out, "Why couldn't it have been Robert?"
He became managing editor of Vanity Fair in 1919, and that was where he met Dorothy Parker and Robert Sherwood. The three of them would go to lunch together at the Algonquin Hotel and complain about their jobs, and those sessions formed the core of what would become the Algonquin Round Table. He was only with Vanity Fair briefly, because Parker was fired in January 1920, and he and Sherwood resigned in protest. He was hired byLife magazine a few months later, and worked as a drama critic for about nine years. He was also a regular contributor to TheNew Yorker during that time, and in 1921, he published his first essay collection, Of All Things!
He also wrote and acted in several short films from the late 1920s onward, usually humorous monologues. Through the 1930s and into the '40s, he gradually moved away from writing, becoming more and more interested in films, but all his work carried the same thread of the self-deprecating and mildly inept intellectual. By 1943, he had given up writing, and in 1945 he died of cirrhosis of the liver. He once said, "I know I'm drinking myself to a slow death, but then I'm in no hurry."
He wrote, "There are two kinds of people in the world, those that believe there are two kinds of people in the world and those who don't." And, "We call ourselves a free nation, and yet we let ourselves be told what cabs we can and can't take by a man at a hotel door, simply because he has a drum major's uniform on."