Very Recent History: "An Age Of Literate Revelry"

In praise of light verse: “During the late 1920s and early ’30s, all of New York’s newspapers carried a daily column of light verse, most famously Franklin P. Adams’s ‘The Conning Tower’ and Don Marquis’s ‘The Sun Dial.’ They encouraged submissions from their readers, and it was in those hospitable columns that many men and women who later made their name as writers and playwrights and wits-Dorothy Parker, Russel Crouse, Dorothy Fields, Alexander Woollcott, Robert Benchley-first saw their name in print. As E. Y. (Yip) Harburg put it, ‘We lived in an age of literate revelry in the New York daily press, and we wanted to be part of it.’”