Charles Hanson Towne

Towne ran American magazines for three decades. He took over Smart Set in 1904, then moved through the Delineator, the Designer and McClure's before editing Harper's Bazaar from 1926, and from 1931 to 1937 he wrote a personal column for the New York American. Born in Louisville, Kentucky in 1877 and brought to New York at three, he was already producing his own small paper at eleven, the Unique Monthly. The verse in Beyond the Stars and Other Poems (1913), Autumn Loiterers (1917) and A World of Windows (1919) keeps to rhyme and regular metre and returns steadily to city streets, lit windows and weather. The Balfour Visit, also 1917, is a different sort of book, a reporter's account of Arthur Balfour's diplomatic mission to the United States after America entered the First World War. Towne later taught a poetry course at Columbia, joined the touring company of Life With Father in 1940, and published a memoir, So Far, So Good, in 1945. He died in 1949.