Happy birthday, humorist Will Cuppy

It is the birthday of humorist Will Cuppy (1884), who is best remembered for a book he didn't even finish before he died. A biting satire on history called The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody (1950) was finished by Cuppy's friend, writer and filmmaker Fred Feldkamp, who also compiled and published a satirical almanac by Cuppy, How to Get from January to December (1951). For 23 years, Cuppy wrote a literary column for the New York Tribune (later the New York Herald Tribune). He also wrote How to be a Hermit (1929), based on his eight-year experience living in a shack on unpopulated Jones Beach off Long Island in the 1920s. Cuppy's columns for The New Yorker were compiled into two books, How to Tell Your Friends from the Apes (1931) and How to Become Extinct (1941).