Alexander Woollcott

American critic

Alexander Humphreys Woollcott (January 19, 1887 – January 23, 1943) was an American drama critic and commentator for The New Yorker magazine, a member of the Algonquin Round Table, an occasional actor and playwright, and a prominent radio personality.

Woollcott was the inspiration for two fictional characters. The first was Sheridan Whiteside, the caustic but charming main character in the play The Man Who Came to Dinner (1939) by George S.

Kaufman and Moss Hart, later made into a film in 1942. The second was the snobbish, vitriolic columnist Waldo Lydecker in the novel Laura, later made into a film in 1944.

Woollcott was convinced he was the inspiration for his friend Rex Stout's brilliant, eccentric detective Nero Wolfe, an idea that Stout denied.