Will Cuppy

Etiquette means behaving yourself a little better than is absolutely essential.

If an animal does something, we call it instinct; if we do the same thing for the same reason, we call it intelligence.

Some people lose all respect for the lion unless he devours them instantly. There is no pleasing some people.


It’s the birthday of humorist Will Cuppy (books by this author), born in Auburn, Indiana (1884). He spent seven years as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, before he finally dropped out and moved to New York City. He wrote advertising copy and tried to write a play, but it didn’t work out. He decided that the big city was too distracting for him, so he moved to Jones Beach Island, off the south shore of Long Island. For eight years, he lived in a shack made of tarpaper, clapboard, and tin, which he called “Tottering-on-the-Brink.” The only other people living on the island were members of the Coast Guard, who invited him to dinner, patched his roof, and rowed him to the mainland on the rare occasions when he had to go into the city. The Jones Beach State Park expanded and forced Cuppy out of his shack, so he moved back to Manhattan and published How to be a Hermit (1929), which was a best-seller — it went through six printings in four months. In it, he wrote: “‘A hermit is simply a person to whom civilization has failed to adjust itself.”

Newfound fame and a life in Greenwich Village didn’t change Cuppy’s hermitic habits. He researched and wrote at night and slept during the day, he ordered food delivered to him, and he talked only occasionally to other people, mostly via letters. He was a prolific writer — he wrote essays for The New Yorker, and reviewed mysteries and crime fiction in his column “Mystery and Adventure” for the New York Herald Tribune — he read and reviewed more than 4,000 novels throughout his career. His essays were published in books like How to Tell Your Friends from the Apes (1931) and How to Attract the Wombat (1949).

As Cuppy got older, he became more and more isolated, and depressed. His health deteriorated, he felt like he was being replaced by younger journalists, and he became estranged from one of his oldest friends. In 1949, he received notice that he would be evicted from the apartment where he had lived ever since he left Jones Beach Island. He committed suicide before he could be evicted. The following year, his book The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody (1950) was published posthumously, and it spent more than four months on the New York Times best-seller list.

Cuppy said: “Intelligence is the capacity to know what we are doing and instinct is just instinct. The results are about the same.”
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