Who still remembers Alexander Woollcott? I mean really remembers him — not as a footnote in a theater history textbook, but as the man who could make or break a Broadway show with a single column, who held court at the Algonquin Round Table trading barbs with Dorothy Parker and Harpo Marx, who was the inspiration for Sheridan Whiteside in The Man Who Came to Dinner? That's the question this little 54-minute audio biography tries to answer, and honestly, the answer it gives is... complicated.
I caught this one during a late Saturday morning walk along the lakefront with Denise. She had her own podcast going — something about true crime, I think — and I had my earbuds in, expecting a brisk, well-produced portrait of one of American criticism's great forgotten figures. What I got was more like rummaging through a dusty archive box someone left in a radio station basement. Which, to be fair, is basically what this is.
A Voice From the AM Dial, Crackle and All
This is part of the Biography In Sound radio series produced by Joseph O. Meyers, and it wears its mid-century radio documentary DNA on its sleeve. The format is a patchwork: anecdotes from people who knew Woollcott, some critical commentary, and — the real draw — sound clips of Woollcott himself. His actual voice. That high, slightly pompous tenor that terrorized publicists and charmed radio audiences in the 1930s and '40s. The anxiety of trying to capture something real — and whether the attempt itself changes the thing — is something I kept circling back to from Art & Fear, which has a lot to say about what gets lost and what survives in the act of making. There's something genuinely electric about hearing the man rather than just reading about him. This reminds me of what Hemingway said about the importance of the real thing versus the description of the real thing. Hearing Woollcott hold forth, even through layers of audio decay, gives you something no biography on the page can replicate.
But here's the problem. The production quality is — and I'm being generous — rough. These are old recordings. Old old. We're talking AM radio era source material that sounds like it was transferred from acetate discs to digital with minimal cleanup. The various participants who narrate and contribute don't have consistent audio levels, and some segments feel like they're being delivered through a tin can and string. I teach kids who won't watch a YouTube video if it's under 1080p. This would send them running.
The Man Behind the Acid Pen
What does come through, despite the audio limitations, is how contradictory Woollcott was. The program paints him as simultaneously the most generous friend you could have and the most insufferable dinner guest imaginable. There's a stretch where someone — I couldn't always identify who was speaking, which is its own issue — recounts Woollcott's habit of moving into friends' homes uninvited and essentially taking over. Just... showing up with luggage. And yet people adored him. Kaufman and Hart literally wrote a hit play about how annoying he was, and Woollcott loved it.
For anyone who cares about the history of American criticism — and as someone who's spent two decades trying to convince teenagers that what critics think actually matters, I care deeply — Woollcott represents something we've lost. He wasn't just reviewing plays. He was performing opinion as public entertainment. His radio show, "The Town Crier," made literary and theatrical criticism into something people tuned in for the way they'd tune in for Jack Benny. The program hints at this but doesn't quite dig into it the way I wanted. At 54 minutes, there's only so much ground you can cover, and I kept wanting them to slow down and let the implications breathe.
Who This Is Actually For
Let me be straight. If you're casually curious about Woollcott, this probably isn't where to start. The audio quality is going to frustrate you. The narration lacks the kind of polish that makes modern audiobook listening effortless — it's flat in places, and the transitions between segments feel abrupt rather than guided. One listener I came across called it "tedious," and while I wouldn't go quite that far, I understand the complaint. The pacing assumes you're already invested.
But if you're a theater history nerd, a Golden Age of Radio obsessive, or someone who — like me — gets a little thrill hearing primary source audio from people who were actually there? It's worth the under-an-hour commitment. Think of it less as an audiobook and more as an artifact. A time capsule from an era when radio biography was its own art form. My students would hate this. I loved it. (Well. I liked it. Love is a strong word for something where I had to strain to catch every third sentence.)
The prose deserves to be savored, except here it's not really prose — it's oral history, stitched together with the tools available in the 1950s. And that stitching shows.
Worth Pausing the Lakefront Walk For?
Barely. I kept it going, and I'm glad I did, but I won't pretend my attention didn't drift toward the sailboats more than once. For Algonquin Round Table completists and radio history buffs, this is a curious little piece of audio archaeology. For everyone else, you might be better served reading a good Woollcott biography and then looking up his actual radio clips on YouTube, where at least you can control the volume. The subject is fascinating. The package just hasn't aged well.
