What do you think?
Rate this book
Deadlines
General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1922 Original Publisher: Covici-McGee Subjects: Journalism American wit and humor History / General Humor / General Language Arts
112 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1922
1 person want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
February 4, 2023
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.
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.
June 9, 2022
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.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews