Christopher Morley Biography Quotes 37 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Christopher Morley was born on May 5, 1890, in Haverford, Pennsylvania, into a household that blended mathematics, music, and letters. His father, Frank Morley, an English-born mathematician known for his work in geometry, taught in the United States, while his mother, Lilian Janet Bird, was English and had artistic interests that helped foster a literary atmosphere at home. Growing up in the academic orbit of Haverford, he absorbed both scholarly discipline and a lively curiosity about books, conversation, and public life.

Morley attended Haverford College, where his appetite for reading and discussion was as notable as his formal studies. After graduating, he won a Rhodes Scholarship and went to New College, Oxford. At Oxford he studied in the humanities, read widely, and encountered the traditions of English letters firsthand, experiences that shaped his voice as a critic, essayist, and novelist. These years also deepened his affection for congenial talk, coffeehouse sociability, and the life of cities and bookshops, motifs that would recur throughout his writing.

Apprenticeship in Letters
Returning to the United States in the 1910s, Morley entered publishing and journalism. He worked in and around the editorial offices of publishers on Long Island and in New York City, including the firm of Doubleday, Page & Company at Garden City. He honed a brisk, companionable prose in newspapers and magazines, writing about city scenes, books, and daily life with the same verve he brought to fiction. Early columns and literary sketches made his name familiar to readers who prized a light touch joined to bookish erudition.

Morley cultivated friendships across the New York literary world. He moved in overlapping circles with journalists and humorists such as Franklin P. Adams, Heywood Broun, and George S. Kaufman, and he was on easy terms with wits like Dorothy Parker and Alexander Woollcott. Sociable and indefatigably curious, he delighted in long lunches that mixed gossip, theater talk, and book chat, the sort of conviviality he later celebrated in his essays.

Novels, Bookish Fantasies, and Essays
In fiction, Morley's best-loved works were love letters to books and booksellers. Parnassus on Wheels (1917) introduced readers to a traveling book wagon and the redemptive pleasures of reading; its sequel, The Haunted Bookshop (1919), fused romance, crime, and bibliophilia in a portrait of a shop that felt like a sanctuary. He ranged further afield in Thunder on the Left (1925), a introspective novel about childhood and memory, and later achieved his greatest commercial success with Kitty Foyle (1939), a contemporary tale of work, love, and class whose film adaptation brought Ginger Rogers an Academy Award for Best Actress.

As an essayist, Morley was extraordinarily prolific. Collections such as Shandygaff, Pipefuls, and Plum Pudding reveal his range: quick-witted squibs on language, affectionate profiles of booksellers, seasonal reveries, and deft appreciations of authors he admired. He wrote with a genial intimacy that made readers feel they were confidants, strolling companions, or fellow browsers beneath a bookshop's gaslight. He could be playful about high culture without sneering, and he celebrated ordinary pleasures, a good pipe, a well-poured cup of coffee, a clean page, as aids to civilized life.

Columns, Criticism, and Editorial Work
Morley's newspaper column, notably The Bowling Green for the New York Evening Post, mixed observation, anecdote, and literary talk in a style that helped define the personal column of the era. He also contributed criticism and features to magazines, and he played a visible role in shaping literary conversation when The Saturday Review of Literature began publication in the 1920s. With Henry Seidel Canby as a central figure and William Rose Benet among the guiding editors, Morley lent the Review his enthusiasm for broad, accessible criticism that could welcome general readers without condescension. He prized clarity and pleasure in prose, and his reviews often aimed to send readers to the shelves rather than settle theoretical scores.

Sherlock Holmes and the Baker Street Irregulars
Morley's most enduring club of the mind was his devotion to Sherlock Holmes. In the 1930s he helped inspire and organize the Baker Street Irregulars, a society dedicated to the playful, erudite study of Arthur Conan Doyle's stories. The group's spirit, half scholarship, half high-spirited game, suited Morley perfectly. He delighted in the footnote as a weapon of wit and the pastiche as affectionate homage, and he welcomed a fellowship of readers who treated fiction as a world to be inhabited. Through the Irregulars he drew together critics, collectors, and writers, reinforcing his view that literature is most alive when shared.

Life on Long Island
Morley settled on Long Island, maintaining a study and, eventually, a small writing cabin known to friends as the Knothole. There he wrote, entertained visitors, and presided over the kinds of impromptu symposia he loved, part reading room, part club, part stage for genial monologue. He remained a tireless advocate for independent booksellers and public libraries, turning up at openings, lecterns, and literary luncheons with the same breezy goodwill that animated his prose. His home base on Long Island kept him close to the New York publishing world while offering the retreat that a working writer needs.

Morley married and had children, and the rhythms of domestic life and neighborhood routine often slip into his essays, softening their urbanity with a sense of hearth and locality. Friends and colleagues from publishing houses and newsrooms were regular presences; editors came calling with proofs, and younger writers sought advice. He could be brisk in opinion, especially about slack prose, but his trademark stance was generous encouragement.

Style, Themes, and Influence
Morley's style was companionable, allusive, and alert to the sound of a sentence. He admired precise diction and the telling image; he distrusted pomposity. Many of his essays amount to a defense of civilized pleasures and a celebration of amateurism in the best sense: the love of a subject pursued for its own sake. In fiction he favored characters whose moral choices are shaped by reading, conversation, and work, clerks, shopkeepers, editors, and young professionals trying to find their way. The bookstores of Parnassus on Wheels and The Haunted Bookshop are moral centers as well as settings; they are places where taste is argued, friendships are made, and life is gently improved by talk.

His influence persisted through the readers he created. Book people embraced him as a patron saint of browsing; journalists borrowed his fruitful mixture of anecdote, quotation, and lightly worn learning; and novelists noted how he could pivot from whimsy to feeling without falsity. The Saturday Review, with Canby and Benet among its lodestars, provided a durable forum for the kind of middlebrow humanism Morley exemplified, serious in intent, friendly in tone.

Final Years and Legacy
Morley's health declined in the 1950s, and he died on March 28, 1957. On Long Island, his name endures in Christopher Morley Park, and his small cabin, the Knothole, has been preserved as a tangible reminder of his working life. The Baker Street Irregulars, which he helped set in motion, continues as a lively fellowship of Holmesians. His novels remain in print, particularly The Haunted Bookshop and Kitty Foyle, and his essays still attract readers who recognize in him a companion, curious, unpretentious, and hospitable to the varied pleasures of the reading life.

Across newspapers, magazines, and shelves of fiction and essays, Christopher Morley made a career out of sharing delight. He stood at the busy crossroads of American literary culture between the wars, talking easily with publishers and columnists, with fellow critics like Henry Seidel Canby and William Rose Benet, and with a wide, loyal public. If his pages still feel like an invitation to linger, it is because he wrote as a host, not a lecturer, pouring the coffee, passing the book, and making room at the table.

Our collection contains 37 quotes who is written by Christopher, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Motivational - Ethics & Morality - Wisdom - Truth.

Other people realated to Christopher: Henry Seidel Canby (Critic)

• 1919 The Haunted Bookshop (Novel)
• 1917 Parnassus on Wheels (Novel)