Neglected Books on Christopher Morley.

Christopher Morley
Library of Congress, Prints
and Photographs Div.

The Neglected Books blog discusses Christopher Morley's Human Being (1932). Morley, instrumental in the founding of the Baker Street Irregulars, is best known for Kitty Foyle (1939), but I've enjoyed his novels featuring a bookseller, Parnassus on Wheels (1917) and The Haunted Bookshop (1919), as well as his essays (collected in various volumes such as Pipefuls, 1920) and his sense of humor (such as his spoof of Henry James).

"We had been talking at dinner of the extraordinary number of grievous deaths of well-known authors that had happened that year. . . . [T]here was Dunraven Bleak, the humorous essayist, who was found stark (in both senses) in his bathtub; and Cynthia Carboy, the famous writer of bedtime stories, who fell down the elevator shaft. . . . [T]he detective bureau insisted that in some unexplainable manner she must have fallen up the shaft; but as Dulcet pointed out at the time of the Authors' League inquiry, the body might have been carried upstairs after the accident. Then there was Andrew Baffle, the psychological novelist, whose end was peculiarly atrocious and miserable, because it seemed that he had contracted tetanus from handling a typewriter ribbon that showed signs of having been poisoned."—Christopher Morley, "The Curious Case of Kenelm Digby," Tales from a Rolltop Desk (1921).