Happy birthday, Marc Connelly.

Playwright Marc Connelly, a member of the Algonquin Round Table, was born today in Pennsylvania in 1890. His life in the theater began with a collaboration with George S. Kaufman, Dulcy (1921), which was a hit for Lynn Fontanne. He continued his collaboration with Kaufman with To the Ladies! (1922), a hit for Helen Hayes; Merton of the Movies (1922); and Beggar on Horseback (1924). He won the Pulitzer Prize for The Green Pastures (1930), which portrayed God as a black man, and the O Henry Award for his Collier's short story "Coroner's Inquest" (1930; rpt. in To the Queen's Taste, 1946, and Ellery Queen's Mini-mysteries, 1969). He died in 1980.

Helene Hanff discusses meeting Connelly in The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street, as he was a fan of her earlier book, 84, Charing Cross Road.

Happy birthday, Harold Ross.

New Yorker founder and Algonquin Round Table member Harold Ross was born today in 1892. He died in 1951. Ross first worked as a journalist at the Salt Lake City Tribune, Sacramento Union, and San Francisco's Call before enlisting and eventually working on Stars and Stripes during World War I. The New Yorker debuted in 1925, according to Ross, as "a reflection in word and picture of metropolitan life."

For more on Ross, read James Thurber's The Years with Ross (1959) or Thomas Kunkel's Letters from the Editor: The New Yorker's Harold Ross (2000).

Ross was apparently intensely devoted to a continuing department called "Are You a New Yorker?", a series of questions such as "Where is the morgue?" and "On what days is admission charged to the Bronx Zoo?" Clipped to this particular questionnaire was a tart note from a male subscriber which read, simply, "Who gives a damn?" — James Thurber, The Years with Ross (rpt. 2001, 25).