Franklin Pierce Adams

About Franklin Pierce Adams

Who is it?: Journalist
Birth Day: November 18, 2015
Birth Place: Chicago, United States
Died On: March 23, 1960
Birth Sign: Sagittarius

Franklin Pierce Adams Net Worth

Franklin Pierce Adams was born on November 18, 2015 in Chicago, United States, is Journalist. One of the most popular, widely read newspaper columnists of his generation, Franklin Pierce Adams was known for his wit and humorous writing style. He was known to his readers as ‘F.P.A’. He authored the column, ‘The Conning Tower’, a satirical column that became immensely popular with readers. He began his career in journalism with the 'Chicago Journal' and later wrote for 'New York Evening Mail', where he contributed for the column ‘Always in Good Humor’. One of his best-known works for the New York Evening Mail was the 'Baseball's Sad Lexicon', a poem on baseball. In a career spanning more than forty years as a successful daily columnist in a New York newspaper, Pierce Adams had the prolific writing skills that amused a large audience. He managed to create a name for himself and became well acquainted with everyone in the literary world. He also served in the military intelligence wing of the U.S Army during the World War I, during which time he also simultaneously authored a column for a newspaper.
Franklin Pierce Adams is a member of Newspaper Columnists

💰 Net worth: Under Review

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Biography/Timeline

1881

Adams was born Franklin Leopold Adams to Moses and Clara Schlossberg Adams in Chicago on November 15, 1881. He changed his middle name to "Pierce" when he had a Jewish confirmation ceremony at age 13. Adams graduated from the Armour Scientific Academy (now Illinois Institute of Technology) in 1899, attended the University of Michigan for one year and worked in insurance for three years.

1902

His books include In Cupid's Court (1902), Tobogganning on Parnassus (1911), In Other Words (1912) and Answer This One (a 1927 trivia book with Harry Hansen). The two-volume The Diary of Our Own Samuel Pepys, collected from his newspaper columns, was published in 1935 by Simon and Schuster. The Melancholy Lute (1936) featured Adams' selections from three decades of his work.

1903

Signing on with the Chicago Journal in 1903, he wrote a Sports column and then a humor column, "A Little about Everything". The following year he moved to the New York Evening Mail, where he worked from 1904 to 1913 and began his column, then called "Always in Good Humor", which used reader contributions.

1911

During his time on the Evening Mail, Adams wrote what remains his best known work, the poem Baseball's Sad Lexicon, a tribute to the Chicago Cubs double play combination of "Tinker to Evers to Chance". In 1911, he added a second column, a parody of Samuel Pepys's Diary, with notes drawn from F.P.A.'s personal experiences. In 1914, he moved his column to the New-York Tribune, where it was famously retitled The Conning Tower and was considered to be "the pinnacle of Verbal wit".

1922

During World War I, Adams was in the U.S. Army, serving in military intelligence and also writing a column, "The Listening Post", for Stars and Stripes Editor Harold Ross. After the war, the so-called "comma-hunter of Park Row" (for his knowledge of the language) returned to New York and the Tribune. He moved to the New York World in 1922, and his column appeared there until the paper merged with the inferior New York Telegram in 1931. He returned to his old paper, by then called the New York Herald Tribune, until 1937, and finally moved to the New York Post, where he ended his column in September 1941.

1936

During its long run, "The Conning Tower" featured contributions from such Writers as Robert Benchley, Edna Ferber, Moss Hart, George S. Kaufman, Edna St. Vincent Millay, John O'Hara, Dorothy Parker and Deems Taylor. Having one's work published in "The Conning Tower" was enough to launch a career, as in the case of Dorothy Parker and James Thurber. Parker quipped, "He raised me from a couplet." Parker dedicated her 1936 publication of collected poems, Not So Deep as a Well, to F.P.A. Many of the poems in that collection were originally published in "The Conning Tower".

1938

As a panelist on radio's Information Please (1938–48), Franklin P. Adams was the designated expert on poetry, old barroom songs and Gilbert and Sullivan, which he always referred to as Sullivan and Gilbert. A running joke on the show was that his stock answer for quotes that he didn't know was that Shakespeare was the author. (Perhaps that was a running gag: Information Please's creator/producer Dan Golenpaul auditioned Adams for the job with a series of sample questions, starting with: "Who was the Merchant of Venice?" Adams: "Antonio." Golenpaul: "Most people would say 'Shylock.'" Adams: "Not in my circle.") John Kieran was the real Shakespearean expert and could quote from his works at length.

1992

Adams is credited with coining the term "aptronym" for last names that fit a person's career or job title, although it was later refined to "aptonym" by Frank Nuessel in 1992.

1994

Adams was portrayed by the actor Chip Zien in the film Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994).

2014

Much later, the Writer E. B. White freely admitted his sense of awe: "I used to walk quickly past the house in West 13th Street between Sixth and Seventh where F.P.A. lived, and the block seemed to tremble under my feet—the way Park Avenue trembles when a train leaves Grand Central."