Abbott Joseph Liebling
(October 18, 1904 – December 28, 1963) was an American
journalist who was
closely associated with The New
Yorker from 1935 until his death.
Biography
Liebling
was born into a well-off family in Manhattan
's Upper East Side, where his father worked in New
York's fur industry. His mother was from San Francisco, Anna
Adelson Slone.
After early schooling in New York, Liebling
was admitted to Dartmouth
College
in the fall of 1920. He left Dartmouth
without graduating, later claiming he was "thrown out for missing
compulsory chapel attendance".
He then enrolled in the School of Journalism
at Columbia
University. After finishing there, he began his career as
a journalist at the Evening Bulletin of Providence,
Rhode Island
. He worked briefly in the sports department
of the
New York Times, from
which he supposedly was fired for listing the name "Ignoto"
(Italian for "unknown") as the referee in results of games.
In 1926, Liebling's father asked if he would like to suspend his
career as a journalist to study in Paris for a year.
- I sensed my father's generous intention, Liebling replied, and,
fearing that he might change his mind, I told him that I didn't
feel I should go, since I was indeed thinking of getting married.
"The girl is ten years older than I am," I said, "and Mother might
think she is kind of fast, because she is being kept by a cotton
broker from Memphis, Tennessee, who only comes North once in a
while. But you are a man of the world, and you understand that a
woman can't always help herself...." Within the week, I had a
letter of credit on the Irving Trust for two thousand dollars, and
a reservation on the old Caronia for late in the summer, when the
off-season rates would be in effect. [Source: The New Yorker, March
29, 2004, p. 54.] Liebling later wrote that the unsuitable proposed
marriage was a fiction intended less to swindle his father than to
cover his own pride ast being the recipient of such generosity.
[Source: Liebling, A.J., "Between the Meals, an Appetite for
Paris", Library of Congress Catalg Card Number 85-73123, ISBN
978-0-86547-236-5 and ISBN 0-86547-236-X, p. 63.]
Thus in
summer 1926, Liebling sailed to Europe where
he studied French medieval literature at the Sorbonne
in Paris
. By
his own admission [Source: "Between Meals, an Appetite for Paris",
see above, passim] his devotion to his studies was purely nominal,
he seeing the year as a chance to absorb French life and appreciate
French food. Although he stayed for little more than a year, this
interval inspired a life-long love for France and the French, later
renewed in his war reporting. He returned to Providence in autumn
1927 to write for the
Journal. He then moved to New York,
where he proceeded to campaign for a job on
Joseph Pulitzer's
New York World, which carried the work
of
James M. Cain and
Walter
Lippmann and was known at the time as 'the writer's paper.' In
order to attract the attention of the city editor, James W.
Barrett, Liebling hired an out-of-work Norwegian seaman to walk for
three days outside the Pulitzer Building, on Park Row, wearing
sandwich boards that read
Hire Joe Liebling. [Source: The
New Yorker, March 29, 2004, p. 54.] (It turned out that
Barrett habitually used a different entrance on another street, and
never saw the sign.) He wrote for the
World (1930-31) and
the
World-Telegram (1931-1935). He married Mary Anne Quinn
in 1934 despite knowledge of her schizophrenia; she was often
hospitalized during their marriage.
Liebling joined
The New Yorker in 1935. His best pieces
from the late thirties are collected in
Back Where I Came
From (1938) and
The Telephone Booth Indian
(1942).
During
World War II, Liebling was active as a
war correspondent, filing many stories from Africa, England
, and
France
. His war began when he flew to Europe in
October 1939 to cover its early battles, lived in Paris until June
10, 1940, and then returned to the United States until July 1941,
when he flew to Britain.
He sailed to Algeria in November 1942 to
cover the fighting on the Tunisian
front (January to May 1943). His articles
from these days are collected in
The Road Back to Paris
(1944). He participated in the
Normandy
landings on
D Day, and he wrote a memorable
piece concerning his experiences on a landing craft.
He afterwards spent
two months in Normandy and Brittany, and
was with the Allied forces when they entered
Paris. He wrote afterwards: "For the first time in
my life and probably the last, I have lived for a week in a great
city where everybody was happy." Liebling was awarded the Cross of
the
Légion d'honneur by the
French government for his war reporting.
Following the war he returned to regular magazine fare and for many
years after he wrote a
New Yorker monthly feature called
"Wayward Press", in which he analyzed the US press. Liebling was
also an avid fan of
boxing,
horse racing and food, and frequently wrote
about these subjects. In 1947 he published
The Wayward
Pressman, a collection of his writings from
The New
Yorker and other publications. During the late forties, he
vigorously criticized the
House Un-American
Activities Committee, became friends with
Alger Hiss, divorced his first wife, and married
Lucille Spectorsky in 1949. (He was later to divorce again, and
marry author
Jean Stafford in
1959.)
In 1961,
Liebling published The Earl of Louisiana, originally
published as a series of articles in The New Yorker in
which he covered the trials and tribulations of the governor of
Louisiana
, Earl K. Long, the younger brother of the Louisiana
politician
Huey Long.
Liebling
died on December 28, 1963, and was buried in the Green River
Cemetery, East Hampton, New York
.
Legacy
- In 2002, Sports Illustrated
named The Sweet Science, a collection of Liebling's essays
on boxing, the number one sports book of all time.
- In 2008, the Library of
America published a volume of Liebling's World War II writings.
The book includes the essays The Road Back to Paris,
Mollie and Other War Pieces, Normandy Revisited,
as well as his uncollected war journalism.
- The journalist and sportswriter William "Bill" Heinz called
Liebling "the best essayist."
- Labeled Chicago as the "Second City" . It became a nickname for
the city.
Quotes
Liebling is remembered for many quotes and aphorisms, such as:
- "Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own
one."
- "People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with
news."
- "I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I
can write faster than anybody who can write better."
His writing was often memorable, as was his eating, and he nicely
combined the two passions in
Between Meals (1962), of
which the following extract gives a taste:
- In
the restaurant on the Rue
Saint-Augustin, Parisian actor and gourmand Yves
Mirande would dazzle his juniors, French and American, by dispatching a lunch of
raw Bayonne ham and fresh figs, a hot sausage in crust,
spindles of filleted pike in a rich rose sauce Nantua, a leg of lamb larded with
anchovies, artichokes on a pedestal of foie gras, and four or five kinds of cheese, with
a good bottle of Bordeaux and one of
champagne, after which he would
call for the Armagnac and remind
Madame to have ready for dinner the larks and
ortolans she had promised him, with
a few langoustes and a turbot -- and, of course, a fine civet made from the marcassin, or
young wild boar, that the lover of the leading lady in his current
production had sent up from his estate in the Sologne. "And while I think of it," I once
heard him say, "we haven't had any woodcock
for days, or truffles baked in the
ashes, and the cellar is becoming a disgrace -- no more '34s and
hardly any '37s. Last week, I had to offer my publisher a bottle
that was far too good for him, simply because there was nothing
between the insulting and the superlative."
Selected works
Books
- Back Where I Came From; 1938 (1990 North Point Press ed: ISBN
0-86547-425-7)
- The Telephone Booth Indian; 1942,
Doubleday, Doran and
Co.:Garden
City
, New
York
(2004 Broadway Books
ed: ISBN 0-7679-1736-7)
- The Road Back to Paris; 1944 Doubleday, Doran and Co.:Garden City,
New York (1997 Modern Library ed: ISBN 0-679-60248-8)
- The Wayward Pressman; 1947, Doubleday:Garden City, New York (1972
Greenwood Press ed: ISBN 0-8371-6173-8)
- Mink and Red Herring: The Wayward Pressman's
Casebook;1949, Doubleday:Garden City, New York (1972
Greenwood Press ed: ISBN 0-8371-6174-6)
- Chicago: The Second City; 1952,
Knopf: New York
(2004 Univ of Nebraska Press ed: ISBN
0-8032-8035-1)
- The Honest Rainmaker: The Life and Times of Colonel John
R. Stingo; 1953, Doubleday:Garden City, New York
- The Sweet Science; 1956, Viking Press: New York (1982 Penguin Books ed: ISBN
0-14-006191-6)
- Normandy Revisited; 1958, Simon & Schuster: New York (
- The Press - Ballantine
Books:[New York City|New York], 1961 (1975 Ballantine ed: ISBN
0-345-24396-X)
- The Earl of Louisiana, Louisiana State University
Press:Baton
Rouge
, 1961 (ISBN 0-8071-0537-6)
- Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris - 1962 (1995 ed:
ISBN 0-679-60142-2)
- Mollie and Other War Pieces - 1964 (posthumous) (2004
ed: ISBN 0-8032-8031-9)
- Just Enough Liebling 2004 (ISBN 0-374-10443-3) - A
posthumous collection of his writings
- World War II Writings: The Road Back to Paris /Mollie and
Other War Pieces / Uncollected War Journalism / Normandy
Revisited, Pete Hamill, ed. (New
York: Library of America, 2008)
ISBN 978-1-59853-018-6
- The Sweet Science and Other Writings: The Earl of Louisiana
/ The Jollity Building / Between Meals / The Press, Pete
Hamill, ed. (New York: Library of America, 2009) ISBN
978-1-59853-040-7
Articles
References
- Wall Street Journal 5 Mar 2008: D9.
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