VO-BB - 20 YEARS OLD!

[Deirdre]

From Today's Writers Almanac, by Garrison Keillor:

It's the birthday of journalist and fiction writer Damon Runyon, (books by this author) born Alfred Damon Runyon, in Manhattan, Kansas (1884). He was only 14 when the Spanish-American War broke out. He couldn't get a local Army recruiter to sign him up for service, so he went north and enlisted with the 13th Minnesota Volunteers. He didn't see combat, but he wrote about the experience for a soldier's magazine.

After the war was over, he began to bounce around, writing for various papers, and he eventually began to focus on sports, becoming one of the early baseball journalists. In time, he made his way to New York City, during the prohibition era, and he started hanging around on Broadway with the crowd of gamblers, bookies, fight managers, theatrical agents, bootleggers, and gangsters. In 1929, Runyon began to write a series of stories about the lowlife characters he'd gotten to know, and he helped popularize the evolving slang of the era, in which a woman was called "a doll," a gun was called "a rod," money was called "scratch," and people didn't die, they "croaked."

His short stories were collected in books such as Blue Plate Special (1934) and More than Somewhat (1937), and they became enormously popular. Sixteen movies were made from his short stories. He's best remembered today for the musical Guys and Dolls, based upon several of his stories and characters he created.
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