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Introduction: Jimmy Breslin's Damon Runyon, A Life
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20386 |
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BOOK WORLD
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3 / 1992 |
314 Words |
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Columnist and Pulitzer Prize winner Jimmy Breslin has a lot in common with the man portrayed in his latest book, the great Hearst newspaperman and Broadway mythologist, Damon Runyon; Both are New York columnists turned fiction writers. Both possess a flair for tough street humor and a keen interest in guys on the wrong side of the law. So it seems only natural for Breslin to have written Damon Runyon: A life, a biography of the spiritual father to a long line of "hard-boiled urban fabulists" like himself.
Breslin claims that his is not the typical biography that idolizes or reveres its subject. Instead, it "is supposed to make you smile, which nobody dos these days." he claims. Breslin believes he is pioneering a whole new form of biography (which dispenses with bibliography, index, and footnotes and places a premium on imagination).
The excerpt was chosen to show Breslin's unique style of weaving fact and legend garnered from newspaper morgues and "watering holes" to tell the life story of what many considered an essentially colorless, dishonest, and lecherous newshound. That such a character could spin such colorful tales of guys and dolls and provide a unique window on the worlds of the likes of Dempsey, Capone, Lindbergh, and Roosevelt makes Runyon's story even more fantastic.
Author Tom Clark questions whether Berlin's "user friendly" biography is dispensing more myth or fact. Can truth be stretched or sacrificed for the sake of entertainment? Professor Patrice D'Itri, who comments on Runyon's contribution to journalism, literature, and the latter, questions Breslin's brand of neobiography and compares Breslin's approach to
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