Franklin P. Adams, better known to the readers of his column as F. P. A., was born at Chicago, Illinois, November 15, 1881. He attended the University of Michigan (1899-1900) and, after a brief career as an insurance agent, plunged into journalism. Adams had already been an ardent contributor to B. L. T.’s “A Line o’ Type or Two” and, in 1903, he began conducting a column of his own on the Chicago Journal. Late in 1904, he came to New York, running his “Always in Good Humor” section on The Evening Mail until 1914, when he started “The Conning Tower” for the New York Tribune.

Adams is the author of five volumes of a light verse that is not only skilful but energetic as well as facile. Tobogganing on Parnassus (1909), In Other Words (1912), By and Large (1914), Weights and Measures (1917) and Something Else Again (1920) reveal a spirit which is essentially one of mockery. One admires these books for their impudent—and faithful—paraphrases of Horace and Propertius, for their last line twists À la O. Henry, (with whom Adams wrote a comic opera that never reached New York), for the ease with which their author springs his surprises and, perhaps most of all, for the healthy satire that runs sharply through all of his colloquial and dexterous lines.