I just discovered him, thanks to a newly published collection of his 1930s-50s writing from The New Yorker! I’d heard the name, but had never read him.
Terrific writer, seek him out! One of the lesser Algonquin Round-Tablers, he did “Talk of the Town” pieces, theater reviews, profiles, short stories. Of course, he was a depressed alcoholic who died fairly young–one of his wives jumped out the window, less than a year after they’d married!
His work isn’t as insistently funny as Dorothy Parker or Robert Benchley, but it is witty . . . More like FPA, if you have ever read him (another writer who needs an anthology). Very opinionated, and his takes on such shows as Death of a Salesman, Streetcar Named Desire and *Cat On a Hot Tin Roof *praise them while pointing out their flaws, too.
He is also a bitch–his profiles of Lucius Beebe and Alexander Woollcott are among the more jaw-dropping character assassinations I have ever read.
He’s most remembered for the profile he did of Henry Luce, written entirely in then-backassward Timespeak style. “Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind.” Everybody knows the final line, no matter whether they’ve heard of Gibbs or Luce or Timestyle or The New Yorker. “Where it will all end, knows god.” Apparently it made Luce tone the style down after 1936.
I like him because I’m one of those rare souls who like parody, and anybody with a pen like Gibbs’ can do a fine one. The best collection of them, which includes the one on Luce, is More in Sorrow.
He also wrote a Broadway play, Season in the Sun, which is supposed to be a roman a clef about having Harold Ross, the editor of The New Yorker, as a summer guest at his beach house. I’ve read it, and it didn’t do anything for me, but I suppose it worked better on stage at the time.
He was a much bigger name in his day, but he’s more timely than timeless like Benchley. The world of The New Yorker died with Pearl Harbor but everybody pretended nicely that it never happened until Tom Wolfe came along with “Tiny Mummies” in the early 60s. Now that was bitchy.
