Guy Wetmore Carryl, son of Charles Edward Carryl (see page 34), was born in New York City, March 4, 1873. He graduated from Columbia University in 1895, was editor of Munsey’s Magazine, 1895–6, and, during the time he lived abroad (from 1897 to 1902), was the foreign representative of various American publications.

As a writer of prose he was received with no little acclaim; his stories The Transgression of Andrew Vane (1902) and Zut and Other Parisians (1903) held the attention of a restless reading public. But it was as a writer of light verse that Carryl was preËminent. Inheriting a remarkable technical gift from his father, young Carryl soon surpassed him as well as all other rivals in the field of brilliantly rhymed, brilliantly turned burlesques. Although he wrote several serious poems (the best of which have been collected in the posthumously published The Garden of Years, 1904), Carryl’s most characteristic work is to be found in his perversions of the parables of Æsop, Fables for the Frivolous (1898), the topsy-turvy interpretations of old nursery rhymes, Mother Goose for Grownups (1900) and the fantastic variations on the fairy tales in Grimm Tales Made Gay (1903)—all of them with a surprising (and punning) Moral attached.

This extraordinary versifier died, before reaching the height of his power, at the age of thirty-one, in the summer of 1904.