Edward Knoblock

Biography

New York, 1874: a baby lands in a brownstone cradle, heir to a banker’s name—Knoblauch—yet the Hudson will never keep him. Harvard hands him a degree like a boarding pass; by twenty-five he’s traded Boston cobblestones for Montmartre lanterns, then fog-soaked London, where the family umlaut and the final syllable are quietly dropped—war-time camouflage for a German surname. 1916, the same year he swears allegiance to George V, Captain Knoblock slips through Europe in plain clothes, filing reports for Britain’s Secret Service between acts of his own plays. He keeps writing: farces, musicals, film scripts that flicker through the twenties and thirties while two passports—one surrendered, one brand-new—gather dust in a drawer. He dies in 1945, a Luftwaffe-proof London night outside his window. The memoir he titled Round the Room (1939) is left behind like a host’s last toast, circling the table of the life he re-christened, syllable by syllable.