novelist sports writer short story
Gallico was born on July 26, 1897 in New York, the only child of Paolo Gallico and Hortense Erlich. His father, a concert pianist, composer, and music teacher, wanted Paul to become a musician and introduced him to many of the leading musicians of the early part of the century, but Gallico, a tall, muscular man who sensed that he had no musical talent, turned to sports.
Gallico attended public school in New York City, where he played football. In 1918 he served as a turret gunner in the United States Navy, then worked as a longshoreman, gym instructor, and translator to pay his way through Columbia University. He captained the college crew team and graduated with a B. S. degree in 1921.
Following graduation, Gallico became a secretary for the National Board of Motion Picture Review. In 1922 he became a film reviewer for the New York Daily News, but complaints about the tone of his reviews led to his dismissal. In 1923 he began writing about sports. From 1924 to 1936 he was a columnist, sports editor, and assistant managing editor for the Daily News. As a sportswriter during the 1920's, Gallico got firsthand experience and color for a story by challenging the athletic champions of the day. During a boxing match with Jack Dempsey, he was knocked out in one minute and thirty-seven seconds, but his story of the encounter, as well as his accounts of swimming against Johnny Weismuller, catching Dizzy Dean's fastball, skiing on an Olympic course, racing speedboats and automobiles, and golfing with Bobby Jones, made him nationally famous, and, perhaps, the highest-paid sportswriter in the country. In Farewell to Sport (1938) and The Golden People (1965), Gallico established a hagiography of sorts of those athletes, male and female, amateur and professional, whose feats had made the 1920's the "golden age. " In 1927, Gallico founded the Golden Gloves amateur boxing competition. Gallico left the Daily News in 1936 and thereafter made his living as a free-lance writer, publishing more than one hundred short stories and articles. He was a contributing editor to the Saturday Evening Post, Good Housekeeping, and, after its founding in 1933, Esquire. In the 1930's and 1940's his stories were featured in the Post, Cosmopolitan, and other magazines with large circulations. He was a war correspondent for Cosmopolitan in 1943. Gallico also wrote forty-one books, including Confessions of a Story Writer (1946), which includes a short autobiography, and eleven screenplays, including The Clock (1945), a World War II film starring Judy Garland, which he co-wrote with Baroness Pauline Gariboldi. Lili (1953), a musical film based on one of Gallico's novels was produced on Broadway in 1961 as Carnival. Gallico wrote the script for The Pride of the Yankees in 1942; the film starred Gary Cooper as baseball great Lou Gehrig and won an Academy Award nomination for best screenplay. The Poseidon Adventure (1969), a story about a luxury liner overturned by a tidal wave in the Atlantic, a three-star film in 1972, became the prototype for other disaster films. The Adventures of Hiram Holliday (1939, 1967) focused on a plump middle-aged copy editor and became a television series featuring Wally Cox. Although Gallico's articles and books were popular successes, his only critical success was The Snow Goose, a 1941 O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Story, later published in book form and subsequently filmed in Canada. Aside from The Snow Goose, Gallico's work received little attention from serious critics of literature. In 1950, Gallico began living abroad, in England, Liechtenstein, and Monaco, where he befriended Prince Rainier and Princess Grace. He died in Monaco on July 15, 1976, of a heart attack.
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In 1921, Gallico married Alva Thoits Taylor, the daughter of a Chicago Tribune columnist. They had two children and divorced in 1934. On April 12, 1935, he married Elaine St. Johns, daughter of the writer Adela Rogers St. Johns; they divorced in 1936. He then married Baroness Pauline Gariboldi in February 1939. They had no children and later divorced. On July 19, 1963, he married Baroness Virginia von Falz-Fein.
