Sewell Ford

Sewell Ford (1868–1946) was an American humorist born in South Levant, Maine, who worked as a newspaperman in Baltimore, Pittsburgh and New York before turning to magazine fiction. His first success was Horses Nine in 1903, a collection of stories told from the horse's point of view; then came Shorty McCabe, a slangy ex-boxer, and in 1909 Torchy, the red-haired office boy whose monologues in Broadway vernacular ran in magazines and books for more than a decade, through Torchy, Private Sec., Torchy and Vee and the rest, and were filmed as comedy shorts. Ford was a shrewd observer of New York business life and of the way its clerks talked.