Henry Hastings Curran was born in New York on November 8, 1877, the son of John E. and Eliza Mulford Curran; he was named for an uncle who had died in the Civil War. Curran was raised in Englewood, New Jersey, and graduated from Yale University (1898). He worked as a reporter at the Englewood Times, and as a reporter and editor at the New York Tribune from 1896 (summer vacations) to 1902 where, for many years, he wrote the paper's "Fresh Air Fund" stories. While with the Tribune Curran attended New York Law School, received an L.L.B. in 1900, and practiced in New York before embarking on a half-century career in public service in the city of New York. He worked in all three branches of government, executive, legislative, and judicial, with elected and appointed positions including alderman and chair of the Board of Aldermen (1911-1917), Manhattan borough president (1920-1921), Commissioner of Immigration for the Port of New York at Ellis Island (1923-1926), counsel to City Club of New York (1926-1928), executive head of the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment (1928-1932), director of the National Economy League (1932-1936), city magistrate (1936-1937), deputy mayor under Fiorello H. La Guardia (1937-1939), chief magistrate (1939-1945), and judge in the New York Court of Special Sessions from 1945 until he took mandatory retirement (age 70) in 1947. He ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 1909 and for mayor of New York in 1921, but had served as acting mayor of the city several times while chair of the Board of Aldermen. Curran's commitment to public service encompassed military service as well: he was recruited to the United States Army's Officers Training Camp (O.T.C.) in Plattsburg, New York, in 1915, and won a commission as a major in the Calvary. Assigned to the 302nd Ammunition Train, he was detached with the 77th Division to base camps in Flanders and Bordeaux, and participated in military engagements in other areas of France. Taken ill while there, he was hospitalized for a time in Nice, and returned to the United States in March 1919.

As he had followed his father into law, Henry Curran emulated both his parents in his literary pursuits, beginning in 1894 when his article "Duck Hawks on the Palisades" was published in Forest and Stream. Thereafter he regularly wrote a columns, editorials, and essays for newspapers and periodicals, and fully understood the power of the media, including radio, which he regularly marshaled on behalf of his career and causes. His writings reveal his special interest in the underprivileged, children, public parks, animals, and stories of the human condition, particularly demonstrated in his writings on immigration (1924-1926) which appeared in popular periodicals including Ladies' Home Journal, Country Gentleman, Colliers, Saturday Evening Post, and fraternal organs including those issued by the Elks and the Masons. Curran published three books with Scribners, Van Tassel and Big Bill (1923), John Citizen's Job (1924), Magistrates Court (1940), and an autobiography, Pillar to Post (1941). A fourth work, "All Sorts and Conditions," an anthology of his "Topics of the Times" columns for the New York Times, short stories, and essays, published and unpublished, dating from 1934 to 1950, was organized but never published. Henry Curran married Frances (Fanny) Ford Hardy (1881-1971) in Seattle, Washington, on October 12, 1905; the couple made their home in the Washington Square neighborhood of Greenwich Village, and had no children. Henry Curran died in New York on April 8, 1966, was buried with his maternal ancestors in Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Biography courtesy of Sandra Markham. Copied with permission from Curran and Mulford Family Papers.