Deadlines

by Henry Justin Smith

This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not impede the reading experience. We believe this work is culturally important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. This text refers to the Bibliobazaar edition.

258 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1922

Reviews

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can't remember why I tracked down a copy of this, but it must have been something H.L. Mencken wrote about it in a Smart Set review (S.T. Joshi's collections of Mencken's work, released as the pieces become copyright-free, are a brilliant idea, incidentally).

At first I wondered what Mencken was so pleased with, since the book starts off with a few bland character sketches of newsroom employees at an unnamed Chicago paper. But Smith is just getting warmed up, and his portraits -- based, I assume, of people he knew at the Daily News -- become richer and more novelistic until we have the full lineup: the cub, the office drunk (just one, presumably for the sake of simplicity), the star reporter, the copy boy, the poet (people were once paid to supply verse for daily papers), the copy editor who in another era ran the city desk, and more.

Their biographies and dealings with one another are fascinating -- I was expecting a stream of funny stories and didn't get them, but an air of wistfulness (almost sorrow), frustrated ambitions, and lives gone awry pervades the book and more than makes up for it. I happen to have gone to work for newspapers when the generation that followed these people was still around, though dying off -- the last years before the transformation of newspaper work into something like a profession -- and there were plenty of moments when I caught flashes of people I'd known.

So points for authenticity and human drama. But will we ever see a book about newspapers where a copy editor isn't a symbol of professional failure, secret sorrows and obsolescence? Probably not.

[Becky Bradway · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very entertaining book from the 20's about the rowdy journalism of the era. Everything in The Front Page is true. Lots of amusing anecdotes about journalists. And really well written! I'm sort of surprised that this book slipped into total obscurity, because it has some historical importance if you're interested in the time period. Carl Sandburg, for one, is featured under the label "The Poet." Ben Hecht pops up, too. It's free online.