Frank Sullivan at His Best

by Frank Sullivan

In the 1930s and 40s, humorist Frank Sullivan took dead aim at the American scene in hilarious pieces written for The New Yorker, the Saturday Evening Post, Town and Country, and other publications. Dispensing humorous commentary and criticisms that could be gentle or cutting, sad or sympathetic, he entertained without ever being mean-spirited or condescending.
This delightful volume includes 42 of his best pieces. Selected from three earlier collections — A Pearl in Every Oyster, The Night the Old Nostalgia Burned Down, and A Rock in Every Snowball — they include an amusingly nostalgic account of "The Passing of the Old Front Porch," a humorous recollection of campus life in "An Old Grad Remembers," and a gentle put-down of the Lone Star State in "An Innocent in Texas." Readers will also enjoy such droll fare as "A Bachelor Looks at Breakfast," "How to Change a Typewriter Ribbon," and a selection of amusing commentaries by Mr. Arbuthnot, the cliché expert, on war, baseball, tabloids, and other topics.
Wonderfully good-natured, in the spirit of Robert Benchley, this vintage humor will tickle modern funny bones and keep readers chuckling at Sullivan's tongue-in-cheek comments on wealth of subjects from the not-so-distant past.

Genres: Comedy, Humor, Essays

192 pages, Paperback

First published December 26, 1996

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads data base.

American humorist. A 1914 graduate of Cornell University, Frank Sullivan worked as a newspaper reporter and feature writer in New York. His work also appeared in magazines such as "The New Yorker."

Reviews

[Peter Landau · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s difficult to write humorously. Only a handful have been able to do it and they’re all dead or wish they were. Frank Sullivan has that rare ability to string together a series of words that are punctuated with a reader laughing out loud, at least that’s this reader’s experience. It made my children look at me as if I’m crazy, when they should know better: I’m just neurotic. AT HIS BEST is a collection of his short writings on a variety of topics as topical today as ointment. That is to say, he’s bemused by gadgetry and affluence, children and breakfast, among other things, all of which he twists into absurd pretzel logic that salts the appetite. His is not the edgy comedy of late, but the late comedy of blunt trauma. There’s a sense of vertigo reading Sullivan, when pulls the logical floor out from under you, unseen outside of metaphysics. He’ll also learn you something. His repeating character, the cliché expert, reminded me of how easy it is to fall under the unthinking rhetoric of unoriginal thought. You won’t find any of that here, though. Sullivan is an original, the real deal, the real McCoy, the real thing, the genuine article, the goods, the gospel…in fact he’s all those mindless synonyms except no joke.

[Barb Best · Rating 4 out of 5]

classic and underrated. Clever and amusing.

[Sue · Rating 3 out of 5]

He lived in our town & wrote for the New Yorker, was part of the infamous Algonquin Round Table in NYC. His home just rec'd award for being a literary landmark. These are pieces he had written.

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Low-key, wry, unassuming humorous essays. Many of them reflections on or presentations of bits of language, and many of those are quite interesting themed collections of stereotyped, ready-made phraseology, often as used by newspapers. These manage to be funny and illuminating at once.