Heywood Broun

Heywood Campbell Broun Jr. was born on December 7, 1888, in Brooklyn, New York, the third of four children of Heywood C. Broun and Henrietta Marie Broun. A journalist, Broadway performer, and book writer, Broun worked across multiple disciplines during a career that extended from the early twentieth century until his death in 1939. He is remembered for his syndicated newspaper column, his founding role in the American Newspaper Guild, and his Broadway appearances between 1924 and 1931.

Broun attended Harvard University without completing a degree. His professional career began in the sports section of the New York Morning Telegraph, where he wrote baseball stories. He joined the New York Tribune in 1912, eventually rising to the position of drama critic. In that role, he reviewed a 1917 production of The Awakening of Spring and wrote that actor Geoffrey C. Stein gave "a ludicrously inadequate performance." Stein sued Broun and the Tribune for libel; the court ruled in Broun's favor. When subsequently required to review another production featuring Stein, Broun confined his only mention of the actor to the final sentence of his column, noting that Stein had not been up to his usual standards.

In 1921, Broun left the Tribune for the New York World, where he launched his syndicated column, It Seems to Me. He moved to the Scripps-Howard newspaper group in 1928, writing for the New York World-Telegram until Scripps-Howard declined to renew his contract. The New York Post then hired him, and his sole column for that paper appeared two days before his death. From 1927 to 1937, Broun also contributed a regular column titled "It Seems to Heywood Broun" to The Nation, though the New York World dismissed him after he used that column to criticize the paper. He subsequently moved from The Nation to The New Republic. In 1930, Broun ran unsuccessfully for the United States Congress as a Socialist candidate.

In 1933, Broun co-founded the American Newspaper Guild alongside New York Evening Post editor Joseph Cookman, John Eddy of The New York Times, and Allen Raymond of the New York Herald Tribune. The organization later became known as The Newspaper Guild and is now called The NewsGuild-CWA, which sponsors an annual Heywood Broun Award recognizing journalism that helps correct an injustice. Also beginning in February 1933, Broun starred in a radio program called The Red Star of Broadway on WOR in Newark, New Jersey, in which he was featured as "The Man About Town of Broadway." The program, sponsored by Macy's, also included musicians and minstrels. In 1938, Broun co-founded the weekly tabloid Connecticut Nutmeg, which was soon renamed Broun's Nutmeg.

On Broadway, Broun appeared as a performer and contributed as a book writer, with credits including the revue Shoot the Works and Round the Town, spanning the years 1924 to 1931. He was also a member of the Algonquin Round Table from 1919 to 1929, alongside critic Alexander Woollcott, writer Dorothy Parker, and humorist Robert Benchley. His characteristically disheveled appearance prompted comparisons to an unmade bed. Broun attended the Marx Brothers production of The Cocoanuts more than twenty times and was close friends with the Marx Brothers. He joked that his tombstone would record that he had been killed by getting in the way of scene shifters at one of their shows.

In his personal life, Broun became briefly engaged to Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova in 1915, but she ended the relationship in 1916 to rejoin the Ballets Russes. On June 7, 1917, he married writer and editor Ruth Hale, a feminist who later co-founded the Lucy Stone League. The couple had one son, broadcaster Heywood Hale Broun. At their wedding, columnist Franklin P. Adams described the usually easygoing Broun and the more assertive Hale as "the clinging oak and the sturdy vine." Hale divorced Broun in November 1933. In 1935, he married Maria Incoronata Fruscella Dooley, a widowed chorus girl who performed under the stage name Connie Madison. Seven months before his death, Broun, who had been an agnostic, converted to Roman Catholicism following conversations with then Reverend Fulton Sheen and Reverend Edward Patrick Dowling.

Broun died of pneumonia in New York City on December 18, 1939, at the age of 51. More than 3,000 mourners attended his funeral at St. Patrick's Cathedral in Manhattan, including New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, Franklin P. Adams, actor-director George M. Cohan, playwright-director George S. Kaufman, New York World editor Herbert Bayard Swope, columnist Walter Winchell, and actress Tallulah Bankhead. He is buried at the Cemetery of the Gate of Heaven in Hawthorne, New York. In 1970, the Baseball Writers' Association of America posthumously awarded Broun the J. G. Taylor Spink Award. A street in Co-op City in the Bronx was named Broun Place in his honor in July 1967.