(Full of humorous stories about gangsters, bootleggers, ga...)
Full of humorous stories about gangsters, bootleggers, gamblers and their women, inhabiting New York's Broadway. A world of speakeasies and dancing girls, where a gambler or bootlegger is perfectly normal and respectable in every way.
Damon Runyon was one of America's most popular newspaper columnists and sports writers from the time of the Jazz Age through World War II. He was best known as a humorist, who popularized an idiom, called Runyonese, in his short stories of life on Broadway.
Background
Damon Runyon was born Alfred Damon Runyan on October 4, 1880 in Manhattan, Kansas, United States. He was the second of four children and only son of Alfred Lee Runyan and Libbie J. (Damon) Runyan. Both parents were natives of Kansas. His father was descended from a Huguenot family (originally Renoyan), that had settled in New Jersey shortly before the Revolution. His mother was an early member of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. A printer and newspaper publisher in a series of Kansas towns, Runyan was a poor provider, who drank heavily and dressed flashily. When his wife became consumptive, he moved to the better climate of Pueblo, Colorado, but she died within a year and the family was broken up. While his three sisters went to live with relatives, Damon stayed with his father, who was working as a printer on the Pueblo Chieftain.
Education
Runyon attended the Hinsdale School in Pueblo up to the sixth grade, but soon left to spend his days reading in the library, roaming the streets with a gang of friends, occasionally picking up odd jobs and adopting his father's barroom habits of smoking and drinking. By the time he was fifteen, he was working for the Pueblo Evening Press, where an editor misspelled his name, changing it from Runyan to Runyon.
When the Spanish-American War began in 1898, Runyon tried to enlist. Rejected as too young and too small, he nevertheless got aboard the train moving the troops to San Francisco. Once there, he managed to get accepted as bugler to the Thirteenth Minnesota Volunteers, but sailed for Manila, in the Philippines, only after the fighting was over.
Discharged from the military in 1899, Runyon spent some time in San Francisco before returning to Pueblo and the Pueblo Chieftain. His problems with alcohol led to short-term employment at several newspapers, but in 1906 he landed a position at the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, where he remained for four years. In his off time, Runyon began to write poems and short stories, including The Defense of Strikerville, which was published by a national magazine, McClure's, in February 1907. After a heavy bout of drinking sent him to the hospital in 1910, he made a vow to quit drinking, a vow, that he upheld for the rest of his life.
In 1910, Damon was in San Francisco, covering the James J. Jeffries vs. Jack Johnson heavyweight championship bout, when his friend, Charles Van Loan, suggested, that Runyon go to New York. There, Van Loan helped him land a job as a sports reporter at William Randolph Hearst's New York American, where an editor shortened his name to Damon Runyon.
Writing for the New York American, Runyon developed the style, that earned him a loyal readership. Setting up his portable typewriter in the press box, he went beyond simply reporting an event to include human-interest details about baseball players, fighters and horses, as well as colorful descriptions of the spectators. At times, his own personal interests were involved in promoting individual fighters, as in his biographical series on Jack Dempsey. At other times, following the adage "I never bite the hand, that feeds me," he reflected the interests of Hearst and others important to his career.
From 1912 to 1918, Runyon served as a war correspondent at Hearst Newspapers. Damon also expanded his audience, when he was appointed a columnist and feature writer at King Features and the International News Service.
Runyon was a keen observer of those around him. Frequenting the bars and, during Prohibition, the speakeasies, he gathered an eclectic group of acquaintances - politicians, entertainers, reporters and gangsters. Many of these became models for the "guys and dolls" who peopled his short stories. As he downed cup after cup of coffee in a favorite bar or nightclub, sat in on gambling sessions, or roamed along Broadway, he listened and captured the rhythms and patterns of language, used by his first person narrators.
Runyon's second marriage coincided with his most prolific period as an author, which saw the publication of several collections of his works, including Guys and Dolls (1932), Blue Plate Special (1934), Money from Home (1935), More Than Somewhat (1937), Take It Easy (1938), The Best of Damon Runyon (1938), My Old Man (1939) and many others.
As his popularity soared, movie rights to several of Runyon's short stories were sold. Lady for a Day (1933), based on Madame La Gimp, was nominated for three Academy Awards, and Little Miss Marker (1934) starred Shirley Temple. Trying his pen at drama, he collaborated with Howard Lindsay in writing the successful Broadway play A Slight Case of Murder in 1935.
When the New York American suspended publication in 1937, Runyon's columns moved to Hearst's New York Daily Mirror. By then he had developed a hoarseness and pain in his throat. Continuing to ignore it, he worked as a writer-producer for RKO Pictures and Twentieth Century-Fox from 1941 to 1943. In April 1944, he consulted a physician. The diagnosis was cancer. Several operations followed as the malignant growth recurred. Unable to talk, Runyon continued to write his columns and to converse with his friends through notes. He slipped into a coma and died on December 10, 1946.
Damon Runyon was best known for his short stories, celebrating the world of Broadway in New York City, that grew out of the Prohibition era. He is credited with coining the phrase "Hooray Henry," a term, now used in British English to describe an upper-class, loud-mouthed, arrogant twit. Runyon's short stories appeared regularly and were popular reading in the United States and abroad.
Damon was inducted into the writers' wing of the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1967 and was a member of the International Boxing Hall of Fame. He was also a recipient of the J. G. Taylor Spink Award.
Collections of Runyon's letters are kept at the University of California, Berkeley, and Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and some of his manuscripts reside in the collection of the New York Public Library.
After Runyon's death, Walter Winchell appealed for contributions to help fight cancer, eventually establishing the Damon Runyon Cancer Memorial Fund to support scientific research into causes of, and prevention of, cancer.
The high regard of Runyon's readers and friends was evident, when, at his death, they responded with millions in donations to the Damon Runyon Memorial Cancer Fund.
It's also worth noting, that, each year, the Denver Press Club assigns the Damon Runyon Award to a prominent journalist.
Throughout his career, Runyon portrayed members of the gangster community as unlikely heroes and heroines, living on the periphery of mainstream society. Much of the satirical humor of Runyon's stories are provided by this juxtaposition of underworld characters with the rest of society. These tales contain subtle social commentary, that often reveals the pretensions and hypocrisy of "respectable" people.
All of Runyon's Broadway fiction is told from the point of view of an unnamed narrator who, by happenstance, becomes involved with thugs, touts, gamblers and various petty criminals.
Runyon's consistent use of the present tense in the Broadway stories reflected the speech patterns of the hobo and underworld subcultures. The present tense narration diminishes the importance of time, thus expediting the action of the story.
Runyon's underworld idiom, Runyonese, is the most prominent element of his style and is based on the clang of actual gangsters, with whom he was acquainted. "Monkey business," "fuzz," "shoo-in" and "shiv" are but a few of the gangland terms he popularized in his fiction, as well as several of his own invention, such as "hotsy totsy" and "phonus balonus."
Quotations:
"Mathewson pitched against Cincinnati yesterday. Another way of putting it is that Cincinnati lost a game of baseball. The first statement means the same as the second."
"Always try to rub against money, for if you rub against money long enough, some of it may rub off on you."
"Some day, somewhere…a guy is going to come to you and show you a nice brand-new deck of cards, on which the seal is never broken, and this guy is going to offer to bet you, that the jack of spades will jump out of this deck and squirt cider in your ear. But, son…do not bet him, for as sure as you do you are going to get an ear full of cider."
"I long ago come to the conclusion, that all life is six to five against."
Personality
Runyon was both prolific and versatile author. In feature stories his use of humor and fictional narrators disguised his often critical view of the world. With fellow journalists, he often helped newcomers, but turned competitive, when his position was challenged.
Physical Characteristics:
Throat cancer was the cause of Damon's death.
Quotes from others about the person
Frank Finch: "Under no circumstances does he get good natured until noon. If he has to get up early in the morning you have to converse with him in signs most of the day because he pants so hard, that his mouth cannot open in conversation. He is a lovely travelling companion, if he happens to be in the next coach."
Fred Lieb: "You felt he was laughing at the world, not with it."
Interests
Sport & Clubs
athletics
Connections
Runyon married Ellen Egan in May 1911 in Brooklyn. They had two children - Mary Elaine and Damon. Ellen, from whom Runyon, separated, died of alcoholism, in 1931, and, on July 7, 1932, he married Patrice Amati del Grande, a dancer. They divorced in June 1946. Both his wives were Catholics.
The World of Damon Runyon
The World of Damon Runyon is not a conventional biography. It is an evocation of an American scene. Tom Clark has written not only a life of Runyon, but also a story of the man's times and the world he inhabited. Clark follows Rounyon from his lonely youth in the old West to success and notoriety in a world of Broadway haunts, fight rings, Press boxes, etc.
1978
Damon Runyon: A Life
This work immortalizes Damon Runyon in a biography of the Roaring Twenties journalist, who covered the Mexican Revolution, World War I, the Lindbergh kidnapping, sports and theater.
