Alexander Woollcott
Alexander Humphreys Woollcott (January 19, 1887 – January 23, 1943) was an American drama critic and commentator for The New Yorker magazine, a member of the Algonquin Round Table, an occasional actor and playwright, and a prominent radio personality. Woollcott was the inspiration for two fictional characters. The first was Sheridan Whiteside, the caustic but charming main character in the play The Man Who Came to Dinner (1939) by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, later made into a film in 1942. The second was the snobbish, vitriolic columnist Waldo Lydecker in the novel Laura, later made into a film in 1944. Woollcott was convinced he was the inspiration for his friend Rex Stout's brilliant, eccentric detective Nero Wolfe, an idea that Stout denied. Early life and education Alexander Humphreys Woollcott was the youngest of five children of William and Frances Bucklin Woollcott, born on January 19, 1887. The family lived in an 85-room house, a vast ramshackle building in Colts Neck Township, New Jersey known as "the North American Phalanx," which had once been a commune where many social experiments were carried out in the mid-19th century. When the Phalanx fell apart after a fire in 1854, it was