Morley, Christopher

Morley, Christopher,

1890–1957, American editor and author, b. Haverford, Pa., grad. Haverford College, 1910. He was a Rhodes scholar. Morley was one of the founders of the Saturday Review of Literature, of which he was an editor from 1924 to 1940. A prolific author, he wrote more than 50 books. His novels, generally in a light vein, include Parnassus on Wheels (1917), The Haunted Bookshop (1919), Thunder on the Left (1925), and Kitty Foyle (1939; filmed 1940). He also revised and enlarged Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (1937, 1948).

Morley, Christopher (Darlington)

(1890–1957) writer; born in Haverford, Pa. His family moved to Baltimore (1900), he graduated from Haverford College (1910), and he studied at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar (1910–13). He worked as a journalist in New York City for many years, and lived in Roslyn Heights, Long Island. He wrote many novels, essay collections, and poetry; his best-known novel is Kitty Foyle (1939). As an editor he is credited with promoting the works of Joseph Conrad and Sherwood Anderson, among others, and as a longtime judge for the Book-of-the-Month Club (1926–54) he influenced a generation of Americans' reading habits.