Winfield S. Moody

One of the men who felt the fascination of handling news at the fountain head in daily journalism, and who made it fascinating to the reader, was Winfield Scott Moody. His career as descriptive writer began auspiciously. He had scarcely got into touch in 1888 with the work on his first assignments for the Evening Sun when New York encountered the Great Blizzard; the incidents of which freak in meteorological history survivors are accustomed nowadays to re-tell with due restraint, and then to have them disbelieved by listeners of the younger generation. For Moody, that episode of impassable snowdrifts and an isolated city was his opportunity. One may imagine how, when the managing editor assigned to him the “blizzard story,” the aspirant for literary fame reveled in details of passenger trains buried under the drifts in Westchester; of the New York Stock Exchange cabling to Boston by way of London, to get the market prices which land wires could not deliver; of Roscoe Conkling lost in the snow on Madison Square and rescued only in nick of time from perishing. Moody’s later editorial and literary work was of a less exciting order. Along with his newspaper contributions he wrote for Scribner’s, edited the Book Buyer, published poems on art and travel, and won some distinction as collector of Oriental curios. He was often a frequenter of the long table in the dining-room, where his whimsical view of the ordinary things of life, and his quickly sympathetic understanding of what the rest had said, gave its flavor to the conversation.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1932 Century Association Yearbook