Franklin Pierce Adams

(1881 - 1960)

Born in Chicago, Franklin Pierce Adams became famous for his witty newspaper columns. Papers with increasingly robust readerships kept poaching him until he ended up at the New York Tribune in 1914, where his column was called “The Conning Tower,” a name it kept even as it bounced around New York papers until 1941. Adams’ friends at the Algonquin Round Table often were given cameos in his more autobiographical Saturday columns. His catchy and topical verse was often repeated by his readers and dubbed “F.P.A.isms.” In 1938 he joined the radio show Information, Please.