“What is a highbrow? He is a man who has found something more interesting than women. When I get that way I’ll stop writing and take to art.”
— Edgar Wallace, The New York Times interview,
January 1932
I first stumbled across a version of this line during one of those slow, restless Sunday afternoons that feel borrowed from someone else’s life. A friend had scrawled it on a sticky note and slapped it onto my laptop. She offered zero context, just the words and a smirk. At the time, I was deep in a creative slump, convinced that serious writers were supposed to be above everything ordinary and human. The quote hit me sideways — funny, a little provocative, and quietly wise. It made me laugh out loud before it made me think. That combination, I later learned, was entirely on brand for the man who said it.
So who actually said it? And how did a throwaway quip from a Hollywood interview become one of the most recycled definitions in the English language? That story is more interesting than it first appears.
The Man Behind the Quip
Edgar Wallace was not the kind of writer critics invited to dinner parties. He wrote fast, sold millions, and made no apologies for either habit. Critics called his prose pulpy. He called their prose unreadable. That tension sat right at the heart of his famous remark.
Wallace built his career in newspaper offices, where speed was survival. He dictated novels at a pace that scandalized the literary establishment. Meanwhile, the literary establishment wrote novels that confused everyone else. Wallace found this arrangement quietly hilarious.
By the early 1930s, Hollywood had discovered him. Studios wanted his name, his plots, and his output. Therefore, Wallace traveled to California, where a reporter from The New York Times caught up with him in January 1932. That interview produced the line we’re here to examine.
The Earliest Known Appearance
The original context matters enormously. Wallace wasn’t just tossing off a clever one-liner into the void. He was defending his own work against literary snobbery — and doing it with characteristic efficiency.
“Mr. Wallace insists there is no mystery about his quick writing. ‘I’m a newspaper man, and in the hard training of a newspaper office I have learned to marshal my thoughts and give them terse expression.
‘The highbrows tell me that my writing is not literature, and I retort that literature is too often unintelligible. What is a highbrow? He is a man who has found something more interesting than women. When I get that way I’ll stop writing and take to art.’”
Read in full, the joke lands harder. Wallace wasn’t attacking intellectualism broadly. He was skewering a specific kind of pretension — the kind that mistakes obscurity for depth. Additionally, he was staking a claim for popular entertainment as a legitimate human pursuit. The remark is funny, yes. However, it also carries a genuine argument inside it.
Rapid Spread After Wallace’s Death
Tragically, Wallace never saw how far the line would travel. He died unexpectedly on February 10, 1932, just weeks after the interview ran. His death prompted obituaries and retrospectives across the English-speaking world. The New York Times reprinted the Hollywood interview excerpt as part of its tribute.
Meanwhile, newspapers had already started recycling the quip on their own. A paper in Decatur, Illinois ran a condensed version just days before his death, in February 1932. The Evening Sun of Hanover, Pennsylvania included it in a collection of “Current Epigrams by Prominent Persons” around the same time.
This rapid newspaper circulation did something important. It stripped the remark from its original context and let it float freely. As a result, the quote began accumulating new attributions and new variations almost immediately.
The Quote Enters Reference Books
By 1943, the line had found its way into Esar’s Comic Dictionary, compiled by Evan Esar. Interestingly, Esar included it without attribution — suggesting the remark had already begun shedding its origin story.
The entry read, in part:
highbrow. 1. A man who has found something more interesting than women. 2. A person you can’t have a high time with. 3. One whose education exceeds his intelligence . . .
The inclusion in a humor dictionary signals something significant. By 1943, the quip had crossed from attributed journalism into the broader ecosystem of floating wit — the kind of remark people repeat at dinner tables without remembering where they first heard it.
A Column Adds Another Layer
In 1946, the long-running Chicago Tribune sports column “In the Wake of the News” printed two items gathered from a regular contributor named Paul Larmer. The entry appeared under the heading “Larmer’s Ledger” and read simply:
A highbrow is a man who has found something more interesting than women.
No attribution to Wallace. No context. Just the line, standing alone. This pattern of decontextualization repeated itself throughout the 1940s and 1950s. People loved the remark but often lost track of its source. Consequently, the quote began accumulating ghost attributions — names attached not through evidence but through assumption.
Russell Lynes Restores the Credit
The most important act of attribution rescue came from an unlikely source: a cultural critic writing about taste. In February 1949, Harper’s Magazine published an essay by Russell Lynes titled “Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow.” The piece became one of the most discussed cultural essays of its era. Five years later, it appeared in Lynes’s 1954 book The Tastemakers.
Lynes explicitly credited Wallace and provided useful context:
Edgar Wallace, who was certainly not a highbrow himself, was asked by a newspaper reporter in Hollywood some years ago to define one. “What is a highbrow?” he said. “A highbrow is a man who has found something more interesting than women.”
This passage did Wallace a genuine service. However, it also created a new problem. Because Lynes’s essay became so widely cited, some later sources began crediting Lynes with the remark rather than Wallace. The Reader’s Digest Treasury of Wit and Humor in 1958 handled this carefully, crediting “Edgar Wallace, quoted by Russell Lynes in Harper’s Magazine.” That’s the correct framing — but not everyone maintained the distinction.
Variations and Mutations
Language doesn’t stay still, and neither did this quote. Several notable mutations emerged over the decades.
In 1961, The Shreveport Times printed an unattributed version that swapped “interesting” for “entertaining.” That same year, Speaker’s Encyclopedia of Humor replaced “highbrow” with “egghead” — a politically charged word in the early 1960s. The entry read:
Egghead: 1. a fellow who thinks about thinking. 2. a guy who’s found something more interesting than women.
The substitution of “egghead” reflects the political climate of the era. The word carried specific baggage — it was frequently used to mock intellectuals in American public life during the 1950s and early 1960s. Applying Wallace’s joke to that loaded term gave it fresh relevance.
The most significant mutation, however, replaced “women” with “sex.”
The Shift to “Sex” and the Huxley Confusion
By 1968, a version of the remark had evolved to substitute “sex” for “women.” British journalist Katharine Whitehorn cited this version in The Observer, attributing it to the novelist Aldous Huxley. Whitehorn wrote:
You can attack synthetic sex or premature sex or mass-media sex; but if anyone made a remark like Huxley’s ‘An intellectual is someone who has found something more interesting than sex’ it would nowadays be taken automatically as a defence.
Huxley had died in 1963. No documented evidence connects Huxley to this remark. The most plausible explanation is that the remark had mutated through oral circulation, picking up Huxley’s name along the way — possibly because his public persona fit the description of an intellectual who might say such a thing. Alternatively, Whitehorn encountered a misattributed version already in circulation and repeated it in good faith.
This kind of attribution drift is extremely common with witty remarks. A line about intellectuals gravitates toward famous intellectuals. Therefore, Huxley, Wilde, Shaw, and Twain all accumulate quotes they never actually said.
In 1988, literary critic Wayne C. Booth used the “intellectual/sex” version while honestly flagging his uncertainty about its source. That kind of intellectual honesty is refreshing. He wrote:
It is sometimes said that an intellectual is someone who has found something in life more interesting than sex.
The phrase “it is sometimes said” does real work there. Booth signals awareness that he’s repeating a floating remark, not a verified attribution. By 2003, however, an Ottawa newspaper confidently credited the “intellectual/sex” version to Edgar Wallace — which is at least closer to the truth than Huxley, even if the wording had drifted.
Why the Quote Keeps Traveling
Some lines persist because they’re profound. Others persist because they’re perfectly structured. Wallace’s remark belongs to the second category — it works mechanically as well as intellectually.
Consider the architecture. The joke sets up a question — “What is a highbrow?” — then delivers an answer that reframes the entire concept of intellectual ambition as a kind of romantic failure. Additionally, the punchline is self-deprecating on Wallace’s part. He’s essentially saying: I’m too busy being interested in women to become a pretentious bore. That’s charming. Furthermore, it’s disarming — it makes the speaker seem virile and unpretentious simultaneously.
The remark also travels well because it’s adaptable. Swap “women” for “sex” and the joke becomes slightly edgier. Replace “highbrow” with “egghead” or “intellectual” and it targets a different cultural moment. The core structure — a person who has found something more interesting than [universally compelling thing] — can absorb almost any substitution.
Edgar Wallace’s Cultural Position
Understanding why Wallace made this remark requires understanding where he stood. Source He occupied a peculiar position in early 20th-century literary culture — enormously popular, commercially dominant, and critically dismissed.
His prolificacy alone earned him condescension. Critics who labored over a single novel per decade viewed Wallace’s assembly-line output with undisguised contempt. Wallace, in turn, viewed their contempt with undisguised amusement. The highbrow remark captures that relationship perfectly. He wasn’t envying the highbrows. He was gently mocking them while simultaneously explaining why he’d never join their ranks.
This self-awareness makes the quote more interesting than it first appears. Wallace wasn’t anti-intellectual in any crude sense. He was anti-pretension. There’s a meaningful difference. Additionally, his newspaper background gave him a democratic instinct about communication — the idea that clarity serves readers better than obscurity serves egos.
The Quote’s Legacy in Modern Usage
Today, the remark surfaces in discussions about intellectual identity, cultural gatekeeping, and the tension between popular and elite taste. It appears in essays about middlebrow culture, in footnotes about the history of the word “highbrow,” and occasionally in social media threads where someone wants to sound clever about academics.
However, the original attribution often gets lost. Many people encounter the “intellectual/sex” version and assume it came from some unnamed wit. Others confidently attribute it to Huxley, Wilde, or occasionally Shaw. The Wallace origin requires active maintenance — someone has to keep pointing back to that January 1932 interview.
The evolution of this single remark illustrates something broader about how quotations move through culture. Source They shed context, accumulate new names, absorb new vocabulary, and eventually become almost mythological — belonging to everyone and no one.
Fortunately, the documentary trail for this particular quote is unusually clear. Source The January 1932 New York Times interview establishes Wallace as the originator beyond reasonable doubt. Everything after that — Lynes, Esar, Whitehorn, Booth — represents either faithful transmission or gradual mutation.
Conclusion
Edgar Wallace deserves full credit for this remark. He said it, meant it, and it fit his character perfectly. The line emerged from a genuine argument about literary value, delivered by a man who had spent his career on the wrong side of the critical establishment — and didn’t particularly mind.
The various mutations — “egghead,” “intellectual,” “sex” instead of “women” — are fascinating in their own right. They show how a well-built joke adapts to new cultural contexts while preserving its essential mechanism. However, none of those variants improve on the original. Wallace’s version has a specific texture: the word “women” grounds the joke in something warm and human, making the implied critique of highbrow detachment feel more pointed.
Next time you encounter this quote — in whatever form — you’ll know where it started. A fast-writing thriller novelist, sitting in Hollywood, defending popular fiction against literary snobbery, cracked a joke that outlasted almost everything else he ever said. That’s a particular kind of immortality. Fittingly, it’s exactly the kind Wallace would have appreciated.