Charles Dryden

Charles Dryden (March 10, 1860 – February 11, 1931) was an American baseball writer and humorist. He was reported to be the most famous and highly paid baseball writer in the United States during the 1900s. Known for injecting humor into his baseball writing, Dryden was credited with elevating baseball writing from the commonplace. In 1928, The Saturday Evening Post wrote: "The greatest of all the reporters, and the man to whom the game owes more, perhaps, than to any other individual, was Charles Dryden, the Mark Twain of baseball." In 1965, Dryden posthumously received the J. G. Taylor Spink Award, the highest award bestowed by the Baseball Writers' Association of America; he was the fourth writer to receive that honor. His biography at the National Baseball Hall of Fame notes that he was "often regarded as the master baseball writer of his time." Early years Dryden was born in March 1860 in Monmouth, Illinois. His father, William A. Dryden, was an Ohio native who worked as a salesman. Dryden did not attend college and worked as a young man as a moulder in an iron foundry. At the time of the 1880 United States Census, Dryden was living with his father in Monmouth, and his occupation was listed as a "moulder." Several accounts indicate that he wrote humorous sketches while working at the foundry and was urged to pursue a writing career by a friend who read his sketches.