Wolcott Gibbs
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Wolcott Gibbs (March 15, 1902 - August 16, 1958) was an editor, humorist, parodist, drama critic, and short story writer for The New Yorker magazine from 1927 until his death. He is best remembered for his 1936 parody of Time magazine, which skewered the magazine's inverted narrative structure. Gibbs wrote, "Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind"; he concluded the piece, "Where it all will end, knows God!" He also wrote a comedy, Season in the Sun, which ran on Broadway for 10 months in 1950-51.
Although not a full-fledged member of the Algonquin Round Table, Gibbs was closely associated with many of its leading names, inheriting the job of theatre critic at The New Yorker from Robert Benchley in 1938. Because his years at the magazine largely overlapped with those of the better-known Alexander Woollcott, many people have confused them with each other or assumed they were related. In fact, Gibbs was a cousin of Alice Duer Miller – yet another member of the Algonquin set – but he was not a relative of Woollcott's. On numerous occasions, in print and in person, Gibbs expressed an intense dislike for Woollcott as both an author and as a person. In a letter to James Thurber, in fact, Gibbs wrote that he thought Woollcott was "about the most dreadful writer who ever existed."
He was a cousin of the eponymous chemist Oliver Wolcott Gibbs with whom he shared a first name. Gibbs, however, disdained the "Oliver" and never used it.
Gibbs was married three times, on the last occasion to Elinor Mead Sherwin of the Sherwin-Williams paint family. His son, Wolcott GIbbs Jr., has written extensively about yachting and was an editor at The New Yorker for several years in the 1980's.
