Broun was born in Brooklyn, the third of four children born to Heywood C. Broun and Henrietta Marie Broun. He attended Harvard University, but did not earn a degree. He began his professional career writing baseball stories in the sports section of the New YorkMorning Telegraph. Broun worked at the New York Tribune from 1912–1921, rising to drama critic before transferring to the New York World. While at the World, he started writing his syndicated column, It Seems to Me. In 1928, he moved to the Scripps-Howard newspapers, including the New York World-Telegram. His column was published there until Scripps-Howard abruptly decided not to renew his contract. He was then picked up by the New York Post. His only column appeared in that paper two days before his death. As a drama critic, Broun once characterized Geoffrey Steyne as the worst actor on the American stage. Steyne sued Broun, but a judge threw the case out. The next time Broun reviewed a production with Steyne in the cast, he left the actor out of the review. His final sentence was "Mr. Steyne's performance was not up to its usual standard." An attributed line of lasting quotability, "Posterity is as likely to be wrong as anybody else", is used widely, often in arguments about documentation and history. From 1927 to 1937, Broun wrote a regular column, titled "It Seems to Heywood Broun", for the magazine The Nation. His column included criticism of another employer, the New York World, who fired Broun as a result. Broun later left The Nation for the rival The New Republic. In 1930, Broun unsuccessfully ran for Congress, as a Socialist. A slogan of Broun's was "I'd rather be right than Roosevelt." In 1933, Broun, along with New York Evening Post Editor Joseph Cookman, John Eddy of The New York Times and Allen Raymond of the New York Herald Tribune, helped to found The Newspaper Guild. The Newspaper Guild sponsors an annual Heywood Broun Award for outstanding work by a journalist, especially work that helps correct an injustice. Beginning February 8, 1933, Broun starred in a radio program, The Red Star of Broadway, on WOR in Newark, New Jersey. Broun was featured as "The Man About Town of Broadway." Sponsored by Macy's, the program also included musicians and minstrels. In 1938, Broun helped found the weekly tabloid Connecticut Nutmeg, soon renamed Broun's Nutmeg.
Personal life
On June 7, 1917, Broun married writer-editor Ruth Hale, a feminist, who a few years later co-founded the Lucy Stone League, an organization that fought for women to keep their maiden names after marriage, in the manner of Lucy Stone. At their wedding, the columnist Franklin P. Adams characterized the usually easygoing Broun and the more strident Hale as "the clinging oak and the sturdy vine." They had one son, Heywood Hale Broun. Along with his friends the critic Alexander Woollcott, writer Dorothy Parker and humorist Robert Benchley, Broun was a member of the famed Algonquin Round Table from 1919 to 1929, where his usually dishevelled appearance led to him being likened to "an unmade bed." He was also close friends with the Marx Brothers, and attended their show The Cocoanuts more than 20 times. Broun joked that his tombstone would read, "killed by getting in the way of some scene shifters at a Marx Brothers show." In November 1933 his wife obtained a divorce. In 1935 he married a widowed chorus girl named Maria Incoronata Fruscella Dooley. Seven months before his death in 1939, Broun, who had been an agnostic, converted to Roman Catholicism after discussions with Fulton Sheen. Broun died of pneumonia, at age 51, in New York City. More than 3,000 mourners attended his funeral at St. Patrick's Cathedral, New York. Among them were New York City MayorFiorello La Guardia, columnist Franklin Pierce Adams, actor-director George M. Cohan, playwright-director George S. Kaufman, New York World editor Herbert Bayard Swope, columnist Walter Winchell and actress Tallulah Bankhead. Broun is buried in the Cemetery of the Gate of Heaven in Hawthorne, New York.
