Columnist - Books

Books

FPA and McIntyre both collected their columns into a series of books, as did other columnists. McIntyre's book, The Big Town: New York Day by Day (1935) was a bestseller. FPA's The Melancholy Lute (1936) collected selections from three decades of his columns. H. Allen Smith's first humor book, Low Man on a Totem Pole (1941) and his two following books were so popular during World War II that they kept Smith on the New York Herald Tribune's Best Seller List for 100 weeks and prompted a collection of all three in 3 Smiths in the Wind (1946). When Smith's column, The Totem Pole, was syndicated by United Features, he told Time:

Just between you and me, it's tough. A typewriter can be a pretty formidable contraption when you sit down in front of it and say: "All right, now I'm going to be funny."

The writing of French humor columnist Alain Rémond has been collected in books. The Miami Herald promoted humor columnist Dave Barry with this description: "Dave Barry has been at The Miami Herald since 1983. A Pulitzer Prize winner for commentary, he writes about issues ranging from the international economy to exploding toilets." Barry has collected his columns into a series of successful books. He stopped writing his nationally syndicated weekly column in 2005, and The Miami Herald now offers on its website a lengthy selection of past columns by Barry.

In 1950, Editor & Publisher looked back at the newspaper columnists of the 1920s:

"Feature service of various sorts is new," Hallam Walker Davis wrote in a book, The Column, which was published in 1926. "It has had the advantage of high-powered promotion. It is still riding on the crest of the first big wave its own splash sent out." But Mr. Davis did think that in a decade or two the newspapers might be promoting their columns along with their comic strips. The World had started the ball rolling with billboard advertising of Heywood Broun's "It Seems to Me." The McNaught Syndicate was sitting pretty with O. O. McIntyre, Will Rogers and Irvin S. Cobb on its list. The New York Herald Tribune offered Don Marquis and Franklin P. Adams rhymed satirically in "The Conning Tower" for the New York World Syndicate. "A Line o' Type Or Two," Bert Leston Taylor's verse column in the Chicago Tribune, was now being done by Richard Henry Little. Other offerings: humorous sketches by Damon Runyon; O. Henry stories; editorials by Arthur Brisbane; Ring Lardner letter; "Rippling Rhymes," by Walt Mason; literary articles by H. L. Mencken.