Heywood Broun Biography Quotes 11 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Heywood Campbell Broun Jr. was born in Brooklyn, New York, on December 7, 1888, and grew up in the city whose newspapers would shape his life. He attended Harvard University in the first decade of the twentieth century but left without taking a degree. The combination of collegiate debate, voracious reading, and the energy of New York journalism pulled him toward the newsroom, where he found the vocation that suited his blunt style, humor, and sympathy for ordinary people.

Entry into Journalism
Broun began his career as a sportswriter for the New York Morning Telegraph, bringing a plainspoken voice and an eye for character to baseball diamonds and prizefights. In 1912 he moved to the New York Tribune, where his range expanded from sports to general reporting and, before long, to drama criticism. As a critic he favored clarity over ornament and showed a readiness to praise new talent while skewering pomposity. The work honed his quick, evocative prose and taught him to treat the theater as a social barometer as much as an entertainment marketplace.

The New York World and "It Seems to Me"
In 1921 Broun joined the New York World, the paper owned by the Pulitzer family, where editors such as Herbert Bayard Swope presided over a vigorous culture of opinion writing. There he launched his signature column, "It Seems to Me", which soon became one of the most widely read features in the city and beyond. The column mixed humor with moral urgency and frequently spoke up for defendants in controversial cases, for workers facing anti-union campaigns, and for the civil liberties of unpopular minorities. He brought the same candor to examining his own profession, chiding publishers and editors when he thought they shirked responsibility to readers.

Algonquin Round Table and Literary Circle
Broun's years at the World coincided with his presence at the Algonquin Round Table, the lunchtime salon that gathered in midtown Manhattan. In that company he traded barbs and ideas with Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Alexander Woollcott, Franklin P. Adams, Harpo Marx, and Harold Ross. The talk ranged from theatrical openings to politics to jokes that were cutting enough to make next morning's papers. The give-and-take sharpened Broun's wit, but more than that, it confirmed his belief that journalism and literature could be lively without surrendering to cynicism. Even as he relished the repartee, he remained the Round Table member most inclined to turn wit into a weapon on behalf of the underdog.

Books, Criticism, and a National Voice
Alongside the daily column, Broun published collections of his pieces and ventured into fiction, extending his reputation beyond New York. His criticism of the stage emphasized humanity over fashion; he was quick to recognize theatrical craft but quicker to insist that a play's social heartbeat mattered. When the New York World closed in 1931 and merged into the New York World-Telegram under the Scripps-Howard chain, "It Seems to Me" continued there, keeping Broun's voice in front of a large metropolitan readership.

Labor Advocacy and the American Newspaper Guild
Broun's most consequential public act outside the column was his role in founding the American Newspaper Guild in 1933, an organization created to secure fair pay, sane hours, and professional dignity for reporters, copy editors, photographers, and other news workers. He served as the Guild's first president and helped turn the notion of a journalists' union from an audacious idea into a durable institution. In that effort he worked with colleagues such as Joseph Cookman and many rank-and-file reporters across competing papers, insisting that a free press depended on the economic security of the people who produced the news. The Guild's campaigns reflected the same convictions visible in his columns: that journalism owed its loyalties not to owners or advertisers but to the public interest.

Politics and Public Stands
During the early 1930s Broun publicly identified with socialist ideas, arguing that the Depression demanded structural reform rather than charity. He admired the clarity with which the Socialist Party articulated those reforms and lent his voice to debates over unemployment relief, civil liberties, and industrial democracy. Without abandoning humor, his writing during these years grew sterner when confronting union-busting, political repression, or abuses of power. He took up cases such as Sacco and Vanzetti as emblematic not just of legal controversy but of the perils of prejudice and haste in public life.

Personal Life
In 1917 Broun married the writer and feminist Ruth Hale. The couple became known in New York's literary world for their independence of mind and for causes they supported together. Hale helped found the Lucy Stone League to defend a woman's right to keep her name after marriage, a principle Broun endorsed in print even when it drew ire. Their son, Heywood Hale Broun, born in 1918, later became a well-known writer and broadcaster in his own right, extending the family's presence in American journalism and culture. The marriage, strained by long hours, strong personalities, and the pressures of public life, ended in divorce in the 1930s. Broun later remarried. Friends from the Algonquin circle, notably Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley, remained part of his social world, alternately teasing and defending him as his stances grew more combative.

Style, Reputation, and Influence
Broun cultivated a public style at once plain and generous. He could be brusque with euphemism and merciless toward cant, yet he rarely mocked weakness. Editors valued his ability to make complex issues legible to general readers, while colleagues recognized how often he used his platform to protect those with little access to power. Though he loved the trappings of newsroom life, he refused to accept the notion that journalism ought to be detached from justice. That combination of professional confidence and ethical purpose made him a touchstone for younger reporters looking for a model of engaged, independent commentary.

Final Years, Death, and Legacy
Broun worked at a relentless pace through the late 1930s, maintaining his column at the World-Telegram while helping the American Newspaper Guild consolidate gains in multiple cities. He died on December 18, 1939, at age fifty-one, from pneumonia. Tributes from across the press praised the clarity of his prose and the constancy of his sympathies. The Newspaper Guild, to honor the kind of reporting he championed, established the Heywood Broun Award, recognizing journalism that serves the cause of the underdog. In the decades after his death, the people who had argued and laughed with him at the Algonquin, including Alexander Woollcott and Franklin P. Adams, kept his memory alive in their own writing. His son's later career in broadcasting gave his surname a fresh audience, but the elder Broun's signature remains the daily column that treated readers as citizens and the newsroom as a place where fairness was something to be fought for, not merely described.

Our collection contains 11 quotes who is written by Heywood, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Ethics & Morality - Wisdom - Love - Freedom.