Free Forgotten Short Story by Frank Sullivan ~ Susan B. James

I want to share with you a short story called the Ugly Mollusk written by Frank Sullivan in 1938. I have loved this story for years and I think we all need some fun about now. Here's the link

The Ugly Mollusk by Frank Sullivan

Any of you who want, to please do download it. It was written for the Saturday Evening Post and published April 1, 1938. My daughter in law typed it up from a treasury of Saturday Evening Post book for a Christmas gift. I uploaded it to Scribed so I could share the fun.

Frank Sullivan was a humorist, a member of the Algonquin Round Table and is a largely forgotten literary figure.

Frank’s fame began in the Roaring Twenties and it is this part of his life that I know will provide some keen biographer with the core of an excellent book. Simultaneously writing for The World and The New Yorker, while contributing to the Saturday Evening Post and other magazines, Frank Sullivan also became an “unofficial” member of the Algonquin Round Table. A daily luncheon gathering at Manhattan’s Algonquin Hotel, the Round Table included newspaper reporters, columnists, and humorists, as well as Broadway playwrights, producers, directors, and actors. Its“official” (charter) members were: Franklin Pierce Adams, Robert Benchley, Heywood Broun, Marc Connelly, Ruth Hale, George S. Kaufman, Dorothy Parker, Brock Pemberton, Harold Ross, Robert E. Sherwood, John Peter Toohey, and Alexander Woollcott. Harold Ross, not coincidentally, was the founder and editor of The New Yorker.

Frank Sullivan had been “invited to the table” as an intellectual compatriot and would become a lifelong friend to many of them. But, before you think of the Round Table’s “unofficial” members being minor players in that scene, consider just some of those who held that rank with Frank: Noël Coward, Harpo Marx, Tallulah Bankhead, Jane Grant, and Edna Ferber. Ferber, you’ll recall, wrote Saratoga Trunk, later made into the musical Saratoga by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II.

Frank’s period of greatest fame spanned from the 1920s through the 1940s. Beyond the Algonquin Round Table, Frank’s friends also included noted writers, actors, playwrights and producers. For example, there was his dear friend and drinking companion Monty Wooley—Yale professor, Broadway producer and actor, and Hollywood movie star. Also, Frank counted the acclaimed novelist and short story writer John O’Hara as a friend. And there were many more friends from every walk of life. That was the gift he had.

You can read more in the post from which I culled this.post. https://pipingrock.wordpress.com/2016/11/26/saratoga-springs-humorist-frank-sullivan-is-honored/