Home > Will Cuppy

Cuppy graduated from Auburn High School in 1902 and went on to the University of Chicago, where he received a bachelor's degreeA bachelor's degree is usually an undergraduate academic degree awarded for a course that generally lasts three or four years. Note that some postgraduate degrees are entitled Bachelor of. the University of Oxford Bachelor of Civil Law. Honours degrees In in philosophyPhilosophy literally means 'love of wisdom' from the Greek 'philo' and 'sofia'. It is now widely used to designate the pursuit of knowledge or wisdom about fundamental matters concerning life, death, meaning, reality, being and truth. The term may also re in 1907. As an undergraduateIn most educational systems, an undergraduate is a post-secondary student pursuing a Bachelor's degree. Students of higher degrees are known as postgraduates (or often simply graduates). In the United States, most undergraduate education takes place at fo, he acted in amateur theaterTheater ( American English) or Theatre ( British English and widespread usage among theatre professionals in the US) is that branch of the performing arts concerned with acting out stories in front of an audience using combinations of speech, gesture, mus and worked as campus reporter for several Chicago newspapers, notably the Record-Herald and the Daily News. He lingered at Chicago seven more years as a graduate studentA graduate student (also, grad student or grad in American English, postgraduate student or postgrad in British English) is an individual who has completed a bachelor's degree (B. or another flavor) and is pursuing further higher education, with the goal in English literature, not showing much interest in his studies, but producing in 1910 his first book, Maroon Tales, a collection of short stories about university life. In 1914 he pulled together a short master'sA master's degree is an academic degree usually awarded for completion of a postgraduate course of one or two years in duration. In the UK it is sometimes awarded for an undergraduate course whose final year consists of higher-level courses and a major re thesisA thesis is an intellectual proposition. In dialectics, its combination with an antithesis produces a synthesis. An academic thesis is a treatise written upon either a student's original research or a review of literature produced by others upon a topic., took his degree and left for New York to seek a careerA career is a course of successive situations that make up some activity. One can have a sporting career or a musical career, but most frequently "career" in the 21st century references a working existence: the series of jobs or positions by which one ear in journalism.

After stateside service in World War I as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army Motor Transport Corps, Cuppy began contributing book reviews to the New York Herald Tribune where his college friend Burton Rascoe (1892-1957) was literary editor. In 1926 he began writing a weekly "Mystery and Adventure" column for the paper that continued until his death 23 years later, reviewing a career total of more than 4000 titles.

Seeking refuge from city noise and hay fever, Cuppy " hermited" from 1921 to 1929 in a shack on Jones Island, just off Long Island's south shore. The literary result of Cuppy's seaside exile was How to be a Hermit, a humorous look at home economics that went through six printings in four months when it appeared in 1929. The book's subtitle, A Bachelor Keeps House, reflects the fact that Cuppy never married.

Encroachment by the new Jones Beach State Park forced Cuppy to abandon full-time residence on the island and return to New York's noise and soot. A special dispensation from New York's parks czar Robert Moses (1888-1981) let Cuppy keep his shack, to which Cuppy made regular visits until the end of his life.

In a Greenwich Village apartment, Cuppy continued to turn out magazine articles and books, always working from notes jotted on 3x5-inch index cards. Cuppy would amass hundreds of cards even for a short article. His friend and literary executor Fred Feldkamp (1914-1981) reported that Cuppy sometimes read more than 25 thick books on a subject before he wrote a single word about it.

Writing funny but factual magazine articles was Cuppy's real talent. He enjoyed a brief success in 1933 with a humorous talk show on NBC radio, but he flopped on the lecture circuit. Basically shy and introverted, Cuppy was happiest when he was rummaging through scholarly journals prizing out facts to copy out on his note cards.

Many of Cuppy's articles for The New Yorker and other magazines later became books: How to Tell Your Friends from the Apes (1931); and How to Become Extinct (1941). Cuppy also edited three collections of mystery stories: World's Great Mystery Stories (1943); World's Great Detective Stories (1943); and Murder Without Tears (1946). His last animal book, How to Attract the Wombat, appeared two months after his death in 1949.

Cuppy's best-known work, a satire on history called The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody, was unfinished when he died. It was completed by Fred Feldkamp, who sifted through nearly 15,000 of Cuppy's carefully-filed note cards to get the book into print within a year of his friend's death. Feldkamp also edited a second posthumous volume, a comic almanac titled How to Get from January to December that appeared in 1951.

Cuppy's last years were marked by poor physical health and increasing depression. Threatened with eviction from his apartment, he took an overdose of sleeping pills and died September 19, 1949, at St. Vincent's Hospital. Cuppy's cremated remains were returned to his hometown and buried in a grave next to his mother's in Evergreen Cemetery. His grave was unmarked until 1985 when local donors purchased a granite headstone with the inscription, "American Humorist." In 2003 Cuppy received another memorial when a committee of the International Astronomical Union approved the name " 15017 Cuppy" for an asteroid.

Although Cuppy was reclusive and cultivated the image of a curmudgeon, he had many friends in New York's literary circles. One of them was the poet William Rose Benét (1886-1950), who penned this remembrance of him: