Gelett Burgess Biography Quotes 2 Report mistakes
| 2 Quotes | |
| Born as | Frank Gelett Burgess |
| Occup. | Author |
| From | USA |
| Born | January 30, 1866 Boston, Massachusetts, United States |
| Died | 1951 |
Frank Gelett Burgess was born on January 30, 1866, in Boston, Massachusetts. He would become known simply as Gelett Burgess, signing his drawings, essays, and verses with the clipped middle name that readers came to associate with nimble wit and gleeful irreverence. He studied mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, graduating in 1887, a discipline whose precision and diagrammatic clarity later showed through in the sharp, economical lines of his cartoons and in the tidy architecture of his aphorisms.
From Engineering to the San Francisco Literary Scene
After early work as an engineer, Burgess moved west to California, entering a fast-changing San Francisco where journalism, art, and public life were interwoven in a vibrant, sometimes anarchic, Bohemian milieu. He taught as an instructor in topographical drawing at the University of California, Berkeley, but his academic tenure was short. In 1894, after the notorious toppling of a Henry D. Cogswell temperance statue in San Francisco, an escapade for which he was widely blamed, though never formally charged, Burgess resigned. The episode, equal parts mischief and cultural protest, pushed him decisively from the classroom into the city's avant-garde literary circles, where figures such as Ambrose Bierce dominated the newspapers and set the tone for mordant satire and sharp-edged prose.
The Lark and the Birth of a Public Voice
In 1895, together with the artist and designer Bruce Porter, Burgess founded The Lark, a little magazine that became a showcase for whimsy, parody, and epigram. Published by William Doxey in San Francisco, The Lark blended drawings, typographic play, and light verse in a manner that felt new on the West Coast and resonated beyond it. Burgess's famous quatrain, first printed there, "I never saw a Purple Cow; I never hope to see one; But I can tell you, anyhow, I'd rather see than be one", turned him into a household name. Its success was both boon and burden; he later answered his own notoriety with the equally memorable rejoinder that he wished he had never written it and "I'll kill you if you quote it". The Lark ran for two years, its final number appearing in 1897, by which time Burgess had proven that a small, playful publication could influence national taste and language.
Artist, Humorist, and Children's Author
Burgess's gifts extended well beyond the single epigram that made him famous. He wrote and illustrated a sequence of children's books about manners and social awareness, most prominently the Goops series. With bald-headed, wide-eyed figures rendered in brisk, confident lines, the Goops became a cultural touchstone, their rhymed admonitions ("The Goops they lick their fingers, and the Goops they lick their knives…") teaching etiquette by leaning into exuberant misbehavior. The combination of picture and verse showed Burgess's dual training at work: visual economy served verbal point, and vice versa.
Language Play, Social Types, and the Coining of "Blurb"
Equally influential were Burgess's essays on social types and on the elasticity of American English. Are You a Bromide? offered a taxonomy of conventional people ("Bromides") and their lively opposites ("Sulphites"), a playful sociology that spread quickly in conversation and print. He delighted in coining new words and rehabilitating old ones; Burgess Unabridged gathered his neologisms into a mock dictionary, capturing the American appetite for shorthand labels and sly descriptors.
His most enduring lexical invention, "blurb", entered the language in 1907. At an American Booksellers Association banquet, he staged a spoof dust jacket for one of his own books, featuring the fictitious Miss Belinda Blurb, a symbol of over-the-top promotional puffery. The joke stuck, and the word became standard publishing parlance. In one stroke, Burgess both satirized and defined a practice that the modern book trade could not do without.
Networks, Editors, and Publishers
Burgess's career was buoyed by close collaborators and canny publishers. Bruce Porter was a crucial early partner in shaping the visual identity of The Lark, while William Doxey's willingness to back a whimsical periodical gave Burgess a public platform just when he needed it most. In San Francisco's bustling press, he moved within reach of strong voices like Ambrose Bierce, whose relentless standards for wit and accuracy set a high bar for all who wrote humor and critique. These relationships offered both challenge and encouragement, anchoring Burgess within a network that valued risk, experiment, and polish.
Later Work and Public Standing
In the years after The Lark, Burgess wrote across forms, verse, fiction, essays, and criticism, often illustrating his own pages. He also produced urban fables and playful civic fantasies that treated modern city life as a theater of habits and types. His knack for incisive phrasing made him a frequent presence in magazines and on lecture platforms, where he elaborated his views on taste, manners, and the evolving American voice. The unity in his work, despite its variety, lay in a disciplined lightness: he trusted the short form, the precise line, the epigram that could be rehearsed and remembered.
Style, Themes, and Influence
Burgess treated language as a living organism. He understood how a rhyme could become a ritual, how a neatly drawn character could stand in for a social norm, and how one well-aimed word could fill a cultural need. The Purple Cow established his public persona; the Goops sustained his connection to generations of children and parents; the coining of "blurb" secured his place in the history of publishing; and the Bromide/Sulphite dichotomy anticipated later popular psychology and cultural criticism. His work also validated the little magazine as a testing ground for new ideas, encouraging others to use compact formats and hybrid text-image designs to shape taste.
Personal Bearing and Legacy
Though trained as an engineer and employed briefly as a university instructor, Burgess preferred the independence of the studio and the magazine office. He pursued a disciplined daily craft and cultivated a circle that prized lively exchange. The practical skills of drafting and design, learned early, never left him; they underwrote the exactitude of his line drawings and the architectural neatness of his verse. Beyond the quips, he was a careful observer: urbane but not aloof, playful but unsentimental, skeptical of pretension yet eager to delight.
Death and Assessment
Gelett Burgess died on September 18, 1951. He left a body of work that is at once featherlight and durable: verses and definitions that survived because they were so well made. By putting West Coast irreverence on the national stage, by marrying pictorial humor to verbal wit, and by giving the language a necessary word for its own publicity, he helped chart a distinctively American path for humor and letters. The names tied to his ascent, Bruce Porter's artistic partnership, William Doxey's publishing backing, the critical pressure of Ambrose Bierce's example, show how a network of strong peers can amplify a singular voice. For readers, writers, teachers, and children, Burgess endures as proof that brevity, clarity, and fun can carry serious cultural weight.
Our collection contains 2 quotes who is written by Gelett, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Change.