E. V. Durling
Journalist covering Hollywood (1892–1957)
Edgar Vincent Durling (1893–1957), usually known as E. V. Durling, was one of the first journalists to cover the Hollywood motion picture industry and later became a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist in the United States, with his column "On the Side".
Early life
Durling was born in Manhattan, New York City, on July 24, 1893, and moved to Brooklyn with his family at the age of seven. He attended Phillips Andover Academy in Massachusetts, where he played baseball and football, and graduated from Wesleyan University in Connecticut.
Career
He began work as a journalist while still at Wesleyan, as a correspondent for the Springfield Republican in Massachusetts. He was the Pacific Coast correspondent of the New York Morning Telegraph from 1915 to 1918, thus becoming one of the first Hollywood reporters. He was in the Coast Guard during World War I, then worked for the New York Evening Globe and the New York Herald. In 1924 he left journalism to head the writing department of a Hollywood comedy studio. In 1925 he was general manager of the Fine Arts Motion Picture Company.
He returned to journalism in 1931 as a columnist on the Los Angeles Express and then moved to the Los Angeles Illustrated Daily News, where his column was called "Town Talk." He moved to the Los Angeles Times on February 16, 1936; his new column, "On the Side" (on the left side of the first page of the local section) was welcomed as a "whimsical, good-natured and slyly philosophical outlook on life." He left the Times in November 1939 when he received an offer from King Features Syndicate to write for national distribution.
Durling died in New York City on September 13, 1957, at the age of sixty-four.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 23, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q5321674. VIAF identifies the subject as 170258254. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1893, 1957, 1915 and 1918.
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This entry incorporates text from “E. V. Durling” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.