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And Still Champion, Damon Runyon
| Article
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20394 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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3 / 1992 |
3,234 Words |
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Patricia Ward D'Itri
Patricia Ward D'itri is the author of Damon Runyon and
Coauthor of Mercury Contamination: A Human Tragedy as well as
numerous articles on literature, history, and women's
studies. A professor of American thought and language at
Michigan State University, she is writing an account of the
international women's suffrage movement. |
From the moment that Damon Runyon's first Broadway story, "Romance in the Roaring Forties," was published in 1929, audiences were captivated. A guy who is just around, an observer who seldom participates in the action tells these colorful tales urban nightlife and two bit hoodlums. In this story, Broadway columnist Waldo Winchester steals Dave the Dude's doll, Miss Billy Perry. But Dave gets her back when a "wide doll"(we'd call her hefty) slugs Waldo and announces that she is his wife. The narrator has tipper her off.
From then on a Broadway tale announced on the cover of a magazine like Collier's or the Saturday Evening Post could double circulation. Enthusiasm for Runyon's work began to wane in the 1940s; nevertheless, biographers remain fascinated by his life. In the latest version, Damon Runyon; A Life, try as he might, Jimmy Breslin can't out-Runyon Runyon. Breslin tries to re-create Runyon's Broadway history from the tales of gangsters and small-time hoodlums. Like Ruyon's reporting, how much of Breslin's biography is fiction and how much fact is still up for grabs. In any case, Breslin' s funniest lines are born again Runyon.
Journalist
The first biographies by newspaperman Ed Weimer and Damon Runyon, Jr., stressed Runyon's fame as a newspaper columnist and his personal life. His widely syndicated columns vividly described the foibles of baseball players and boxers as well as the rich and famous who came to trial for marital infidelity, murder, or tax evasion. If a big story broke, William Randolph Hearst's star reporter, Damon Runyon, covered it for the New York American, enhancing the facts as necessary to make it exciting.
Runyon could wring out the sentiment too, for example, contrasting an observer's view of the returning troops parading down Fifth Avenue at the end of the World War I with a bystander's comments as she searches the faces for the son she knows is not among them. He adapted old yarns and anecdotes into vignettes about his Colorado boyhood in My Old Home Town Out West, much the way Washington Irving adapted a German folktale to a New England setting in "Rip Van Winkle." Several other volumes of these tales, My Old Man (1939) and In Our Town (1946), were published, but as they lacked Runyon's trademark touches--the contrast between gangland and the larger society, the plot twists, the observer narrator, and the stylized Runyonese they attracted little interest.
When lead columnist Arthur
...
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