John Thomas
John Thomas was a notable American writer born in 1900 into a wealthy New York family. He studied at Yale University, where he distinguished himself as the chairman of the Yale Literary Magazine and won the Metcalf Prize for a dramatic essay before graduating in 1922. Thomas later moved to Paris, where he became part of the vibrant expatriate community. His novel, *Dry Martini: A Gentleman Turns to Love* (1926), offers an exploration of the contrasting lifestyles of affluent expatriates and struggling artists in the city, with a focus on the character Willoughby Quimby, who embodies the dilemmas of a middle-aged man trying to navigate relationships and personal reform amidst a social backdrop of bars and nightlife.
Despite its old-fashioned narrative style, the novel gained attention and was adapted into a film starring Mary Astor in 1928. Thomas's life was marked by personal challenges, including his struggle with alcoholism, which ultimately led to his untimely death in 1932. His experiences reflect both the allure and the pitfalls of the expatriate lifestyle in early 20th century Europe, making him a significant figure in the literary landscape of that era.
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John Thomas
Writer
- Born: 1900
- Birthplace: New York, New York
- Died: March 12, 1932
- Place of death: New York, New York
Biography
John Thomas, the son of Dr. and Mrs. Allen M. Thomas, was born in 1900 into an affluent and socially prominent New York family. He attended Yale University, where he became the chairman of the Yale Literary Magazine and won the Metcalf Prize for a dramatic essay. After graduating in 1922, he went to Paris to study at the Sorbonne and to begin his career as a writer. The impoverished American expatriates of Montparnasse lived on the Left Bank while the more established and successful writers, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Louis Bromfield, could afford to live on the Right Bank.
Thomas’s novel, Dry Martini: A Gentleman Turns to Love (1926), is written from a Right Bank point of view. In a chapter entitled “La Vie de Boheme,” he comments that the principal virtue of the Left Bank intellectual is that he does not have false pride. The intellectual freely acknowledges that he is dead broke and would like to borrow money and get drunk every night—at someone else’s expense. Thomas preferred to do his drinking at the Ritz Hotel bar on the Rue Cambon.
The protagonist of Dry Martini, Willoughby Quimby, is an affluent expatriate who has more in common with the survivors of the Edwardian era than the rebellious intellectuals of the 1920’s. Quimby frequents the Garden of Allah, a bar modeled on the Ritz. A middle-aged sophisticate, Quimby decides to reform his habits in order to serve as an example for his twenty-year- old daughter, Elizabeth. He fails to protect Elizabeth from the advances of Conway Cross, an unprincipled roué of his acquaintance. Elizabeth is salvaged by another of his friends, Freddy Fletcher. Quimby decides to remarry in order to keep his life from becoming an endless round of cocktails. His overtures to a succession of women—his daughter’s best friend, the love of his youth, and even his former wife—fail and he returns to his bars. Dry Martini seemed old-fashioned to Thomas’s contemporaries because he did not experiment with point of view, preferring instead to use an omniscient narrator to tell the story. Even so, Dry Martini was made into a film starring Mary Astor as Elizabeth that opened in New York in November, 1928.
Thomas returned to New York in 1925 and married Josephine Scott in April. They went to Europe for an extensive honeymoon and then settled in New York; the marriage ended in divorce in 1930. Thomas had begun work on a book that was to describe the history of Fifty-eighth Street from the East River to Harlem. He made Dan Moriarty’s bar at 216 East 58th Street his drinking headquarters. This project was never completed because Thomas died of alcoholism in March, 1932.