Octavus Roy Cohen
A prolific writer who impacted popular culture lived here. Octavus Roy Cohen (1891–1959) was the son of Rebecca Ottolengui Cohen and her husband, journalist and attorney, Octavus Cohen. The family was listed at 86 Beaufain Street in 1908, while Octavus Roy was attending Clemson College (now University). He clerked in his father’s law office before opening his own office in the Peoples Building on Broad Street. He and his wife, Inez Lopez, lived briefly at 14 Green Street.
Leaving Charleston for Birmingham, Alabama, where he worked as journalist, and then for New York and Los Angeles, Cohen became phenomenally popular. He turned out nearly sixty novels and hundreds of short stories. The writer of Broadway plays and scripts for radio and movie shows, he worked for a while as an adapter of the “Amos and Andy”radio shows. Most of his writings were either detective stories, or tales of black life. As popular as they were at the time, many of his contributions in the latter field are now dismissed as racist vignettes that perpetuate disrespectful cultural stereotypes. (His mother’s uncle, Daniel Ottolengui, had gained some fame in the nineteenth century for similar works.)
Octavus Roy Cohen (1891–1959) promoting White Owl Cigars, 1940
Octavus Roy Cohen (1891–1959), journalist and popular fiction writer
Rebecca Ottolengui Cohen (1856–1938), ca. 1906
Mother of writer Octavus Roy Cohen (1891–1959).
86 Beaufain Street, no date
Former home of Rebecca Ottolengui Cohen and her husband, Octavus Cohen, parents of author Octavus Roy Cohen (1891–1959). Courtesy of The Margaretta Childs Archives at Historic Charleston Foundation.