User:Toodles The Grey/sandbox/B. R. Crisler

Benjamin Roy Crisler (January 1905 – May 16, 1982) was an American journalist best known for his movie and book reviews as well as articles on cinema published in The New York Times and The New York Times Book Review with the byline B. R. Crisler.

Early Life
Crisler was born in January 1905 to Anne McAfee and Roy Crisler in Canton, Georgia. Roy was a prominent businessmen and politician in Canton.

Crisler attended Canton High School. He contributed a "High School Gossip" column in the local newspaper, The Cherokee Advance, in 1921 and graduated in 1922. He attended Emory University, where he and the other students in his journalism class wrote most of the stories in the May 17, 1923, issue of The Atlanta Constitution as part of an annual exercise arranged by the class instructor and head of the English department, Dr. W. F. Melton. Crisler was the third generation in his family to attend Emory.

Career
Crisler began his journalism career working for The Atlanta Constitution, becoming a member of the editorial staff by 1930.

In 1932, Crisler joined The New York Times as a staff writer. He started writing about cinema in 1934, and became a regular movie critic in the late 1930s. He moved to PM during the newspaper's first year of operation in 1940. He was the theater and film feature writer for The Christian Science Monitor by 1950.

Personal Life
In 1930, Crisler married Marguerite Cobbey, an opera coloratura soprano, at the Little Church Around the Corner in New York City before the end of Marguerite's concert tour. Marguerite was born to Mr. and Mrs. Henry M. Cobbey in Fresno, California. She was a direct descendant of U.S. presidents John Adams and John Quincy Adams.

Crisler spent the last ten years of his life in Pacific Grove, California, where he died in his home on May 16, 1982.