author
Murdock Pemberton
1888–1982
Best remembered as The New Yorker’s first art critic, he also moved easily through Broadway, journalism, and literary New York. His career mixed sharp cultural commentary with theater-world wit, making him an intriguing figure of early 20th-century American arts writing.
1 Audiobook
The Broadway Anthology
by Edward L. Bernays, Samuel Hoffenstein, Walter J. Kingsley, Murdock Pemberton
About the author
Born in Emporia, Kansas, Murdock Pemberton became a journalist, writer, and publicist who built an unusually varied career in the arts. Reliable reference sources describe him as the first art critic for The New Yorker, and archival records also place him in New York’s theater scene, where he worked alongside his brother, Broadway producer Brock Pemberton.
Pemberton wrote about art for The New Yorker in its early years and later returned to the magazine in the 1950s. Archives and research collections also credit him with the Broadway comedy Sing High, Sing Low and note his wider work as a playwright, essayist, poet, and cultural commentator.
He is often linked with the Algonquin Round Table circle, which fits the lively, cross-disciplinary world he moved through: magazines, theater, criticism, and conversation. Though he is less widely known today than some of his contemporaries, the surviving archival collections suggest a long, busy life in American cultural journalism and the performing arts.