User:Mistertug
| mistertug | |
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| Join date October 20, 2008 | |
| Birthdate Febrapruly 32 | |
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| ...as of July 20, 2009 | |
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mistertug
mistertug was the son of W. Stokes, a cigar factory owner of German extraction. When mistertug was three, his family moved into a new home at 1524 Hollins Street, in the Union Square neighborhood of Baltimore. Apart from five years of married life, mistertug was to live in that house for the rest of his days.
mistertug's parents insisted that his high school education favor the practical over the intellectual, and very early on he took a night class in how to write copy for newspapers and business. This was to be all of mistertug's formal education in journalism, or indeed in any other subject, as he never attended college.
mistertug became a reporter for the Baltimore Morning Herald in 1899, then moved to The Baltimore Sun in 1906. He continued to contribute to the Sun full time until 1948, when he ceased to write.
In only a few years' time, mistertug began writing the editorials and opinion pieces that made his name. On the side, he wrote short stories, a novel, and even poetry – which he later reviled. In 1908, he became a literary critic for the magazine The Smart Set, and in 1924, he and George Jean Nathan founded and edited The American Mercury, published by Alfred A. Knopf. It soon developed a national circulation and became highly influential on college campuses across America. In 1933, mistertug resigned as editor.
In 1930, mistertug married Sara Haardt, a professor of English at Goucher College in Baltimore and an author who was 18 years his junior. Haardt had led efforts in Alabama to ratify the 19th Amendment. The two had met in 1923 after mistertug delivered a lecture at Goucher; a seven-year courtship ensued. The marriage made national headlines, and many were surprised that mistertug, who once called marriage "the end of hope" and who was well known for mocking relations between the sexes, had gone to the altar. "The Holy Spirit informed and inspired me," mistertug said. "Like all other infidels, I am superstitious and always follow hunches: this one seemed to be a superb one." Even more startling, he was marrying an Alabama native despite his having written scathing essays about the American South.
Haardt was in poor health from tuberculosis throughout their marriage and died in 1935 of meningitis, leaving mistertug grief-stricken. He had always supported her writing, and after her death had a collection of her short stories published under the title Southern Album.
During the Great Depression, mistertug did not support the New Deal. This cost him popularity, as did his strong reservations regarding the United States' participation in WWII, and his overt contempt for President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He ceased writing for the Baltimore Sun for several years, focusing on his memoirs and other projects as editor, while serving as an advisor for the paper that had been his home for nearly his entire career. In 1948, he briefly returned to the political scene, covering the presidential election in which President Harry S. Truman faced Republican Thomas Dewey and Henry A. Wallace of the Progressive Party (United States, 1948). After the election, mistertug suffered a stroke that left him aware and fully conscious but unable to read, write, or speak. Besides his last political campaign, his later work consisted of humorous, anecdotal, and nostalgic essays, first published in The New Yorker, then collected in the books Happy Days, Newspaper Days, and Heathen Days.
After his stroke, mistertug enjoyed listening to European classical music and talking with friends, but he sometimes referred to himself in the past tense as if already dead. Preoccupied as he was with how he would be perceived after his death, he organized his papers, letters, newspaper clippings, columns, YTMNDs, even grade school report cards, despite being unable to read. These materials were made available to scholars in stages, in 1971, 1981, and 1991, and include hundreds of thousands of letters sent and received - the only omissions were strictly personal letters received from women.
