Howard Teichmann (1916–1987)

Dark, dirty, bitter and funny. A man struggling with morality and losing his mind in the process. Beautiful filth. I need to have a bath now.
Also some of the sentences were so compelling that i had to reread them a bunch of times and savour their delicate composition.

Drama critic, author, lecturer, and actor Alexander Woollcott was a famous wit and a diamond in the tiara that was the Algonquin Round Table, a collection of some of the wittiest and brightest men and women of American letters in the early twentieth century. Woollcott's irascibility and acerbic nature were famous and he was immortalized as the leading character (only slightly disguised) in the Kaufman and Hart play THE MAN WHO CAME TO DINNER. Howard Teichmann, who wrote a splendid biography show more of playwright and fellow Algonquian George S. Kaufman, brings Woollcott to fascinating life in this clear-eyed biography. show less

Many reviewers seem to extract a lot from this short novella, but the main takeaway for me is that you wouldn't want to be a woman in 1930s New York City.

Started strong and it's studded with vivid and sometimes twisted imagery but the wheels sort of come off toward the end.