He was born in Haverford, Pennsylvania.
He was a Rhodes Scholar. Morley was one of the founders and long-time editor of the Saturday Review of Literature. Morley got his start as a newspaper reporter and then Columnist for various New York City newspapers.
He is well known as the founder and president of the Baker Street Irregulars and wrote the introduction to the standard omnibus edition of Sherlock Holmes. In 1936 he was appointed to revise and enlarge Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (1937, 1948).
Author of more than 50 books of poetry and novels, Morley is probably best known as the author of Kitty Foyle (1939), which was made into an Academy Award-winning movie. His other well known works include Thunder on the Left (1925), and The Haunted Bookshop (1919) and Parnassus on Wheels (1917), his two semi-biographical novels of a fictional bookseller.
Morley was a close friend of Don Marquis, author of the Archy and Mehitabel stories featuring the antics and commentary of a New York cockroach and a cat.
External Links
Morley on Books
"Lord!" he said, "when you sell a man a book you don't sell him just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night - there's all heaven and earth in a book, a real book I mean. Jiminy! If I were the baker or the butcher or the broom huckster, people would run to the gate when I came by - just waiting for my stuff. And here I go loaded with everlasting salvation - yes, ma'am, salvation for their little, stunted minds - and it's hard to make 'em see it. That's what makes it worth while - I'm doing something that nobody else from Nazareth, Maine, to Walla Walla, Washington, has ever thought of. It's a new field, but by the bones of Whitman, it's worth while. That's what this country needs - more books!"
— Roger Mifflen, as written by Christopher Morley in Parnassus on Wheels, 1917