Alexander Woollcott (January 19, 1887 - January 23, 1942) was a critic and commentator for The New Yorker magazine, and a member of the Algonquin Round Table. He was the inspiration for Sheridan Whiteside, the main character in the play The Man Who Came to Dinner by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. His review of the Marx Brothers' Broadway debut, I'll Say She Is , helped launch the team's movie career. He was, however, frequently criticized for his ornate, florid style of writing and, in contrast to his contemporaries James Thurber and S.J. Perelman, he is little read today.
Woollcott never married or had children, although he had a large number of female friends. In his early twenties he contracted the mumps, which left him mostly, if not completely, impotent.
Woollcott called for normalization of U.S.-Soviet relations. He was a friend of reporter Walter Duranty and Soviet foreign minister Maxim Litvinov, and traveled to the U.S.S.R. in the 1930s.
Towards the end of his life he semi-retired to an island he had purchased on Lake Bomoseen in Vermont. He died in New York while participating in a 1942 radio program on the war in Europe, one of the celebrated few in broadcast media to die live "on the air".
