Crichton, Kyle Samuel: - Kyle Crichton was born in 1896 in Peale, a town in Pennsylvania's coal-mining country. He worked as a coal miner, a turret-lathe operator in a machine shop, and an open-hearth puddler in the Allegheny steel mills. He attended Bethlehem's Lehigh University, was admitted to membership in Phi Delta Theta, and graduated in 1917. Upon becoming afflicted with tuberculosis in the 1920s, Crichton went to New Mexico, where he entered Albuquerque's Methodist Sanatorium. After recovering, he was active in politics, for a time serving as manager of the Albuquerque Civic Council. He turned to writing in 1922, and his first book, "Law and Order, Ltd.," a biography of the quirky and colorful lawyer and former outlaw Elfego Baca, was published in 1928.He moved to New York City in 1929 and was hired by Scribner's as a book editor, working under the legendary Maxwell Perkins. He was a member of the New York literary community for the next thirty years. He wrote articles for the publications Daily Worker and New Masses espousing a left-wing political point of view under the pen name Robert Forsythe. He also wrote interviews and articles under his own name for Collier's Weekly, where he was associate editor. His next two books, "Redder Than the Rose" (1936) and "Reading from Left to Right" (1938) collected essays and articles critical of everything from capitalism and William Randolph Hearst to Broadway and H.L. Mencken. His other books include the novels "Proud People" and "The History of the Adventures of George Whigham and his Friend Mr. Clancey Hobson"; the biography of the soprano Risë Stevens "Subway to the Met," the biography of Anthony Joseph Drexel Biddle "My Philadelphia Father," which was successfully adapted for the Broadway stage and later a Disney musical film as The Happiest Millionaire; a biography of the Marx Brothers; and "Total Recoil," an account of personalities he met over a forty-year period. He died in 1960 in New York City.