J. P. McEvoy

Who was J. P. McEvoy?

Joseph Patrick McEvoy, also sometimes credited as John P. McEvoy or Joseph P. McEvoy, was an American writer whose stories were published during the 1920s and 1930s in popular magazines such as Liberty, The Saturday Evening Post and Cosmopolitan. Many of his stories were adapted to movies during this period, including It's a Gift starring W.C. Fields. McEvoy also had a hit play, The Potters, contributed to the Ziegfeld Follies and wrote a number of novels, including Show Girl and Hollywood Girl. These two novels were adapted into the movies Show Girl and Show Girl in Hollywood, both starring Alice White.

McEvoy is perhaps best known as the creator and writer of the popular newspaper comic strip Dixie Dugan, based on Show Girl, which had been serialized in a national magazine with illustrations by John H. Striebel, who continued on as the illustrator of the comic strip. With the title character resembling actress Louise Brooks, the strip was distributed by the McNaught Syndicate and had a long run from 1929 to 1966. McEvoy had previously written a syndicated feature called "Slams of Life"; a collection of these columns was published under the same title in 1919, with the promise "with malice for all and charity toward none." In 2003, James Curtis described the writer's outlook and approach: "In McEvoy's world, nothing ever worked the way it was supposed to and the poor working schlepp always took it in the shorts."