Franklin Pierce Adams

Franklin Pierce Adams, universally known by his initials F. P. A., was an American newspaper columnist, humorist, and panelist whose daily column The Conning Tower served as a literary salon in print for early twentieth-century New York. Born in Chicago in 1881, he attended the University of Michigan for one year before returning home to sell insurance.

He began writing humor for the Chicago Journal in 1903 and moved to New York in 1904, where his column passed through the Evening Mail, the Tribune, the World, the Herald Tribune, and finally the Post. Adams encouraged unknown contributors by running their light verse and wit beside established names, helping launch the careers of Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, George S. Kaufman, and Edna Ferber.

His 1910 verse Baseball's Sad Lexicon, which immortalised the Chicago Cubs double-play combination "Tinker to Evers to Chance," entered American sports memory and contributed to all three players' eventual Hall of Fame elections. He also published a long-running mock-Pepys diary chronicling Manhattan literary life.

Adams was a charter member of the Algonquin Round Table and a regular panelist on the radio quiz show Information, Please! from 1938 to 1948. Failing health and the decline of newspaper humor columns ended his run; he died in New York in 1960 at seventy-eight.

The name Franklin is a masculine name of English origin from Middle English frankeleyn, meaning "free man" or "free landholder." Widely adopted in nineteenth-century America in tribute to Benjamin Franklin, it carried associations of plain-spoken wit and democratic civic virtue, both qualities his namesake columnist consciously cultivated in print.