 Paul Gallico is a storyteller whose inimitable style of humour, gentle satire and human (and animal) understanding has given pleasure to millions of readers,
Many of his novels have been made into movies, including Love, Let Me Not Hunger, The Hand of Mary Constable and the Zoo Gang.
He was born on 26 July 1879 in New York City to an Italian father and Austrian mother, was educated at Columbia University where he graduated in 1919, and in the 1920s became a notable sportswriter, sports columnist and sports editor working at the New York Daily News.
He launched his writing career with an interview with Jack Dempsey, a heavyweight boxer, in which he asked Dempsey to spar with him, describing how it felt to be knocked out by the boxing champion. This was followed by accounts of catching Dizzy Dean’s fastball and golfing with Bobby Jones.
During this time he became somewhat of a national celebrity and one of the highest paid sportswriters in America.
His exit from the world of sports writing and into a world a fiction came in the late 1930s, introduced by his essay based on the decision he had made entitled Farewell to Sport.
He them went on to become an extremely successful short-story writer for magazines as well as publishing numerous novels, the likes of which include The Snow Goose, Trial by Terror and The Poseidon Adventure.
Gallico was a self-professed “storyteller”, once telling New York Magazine, “I just like to tell stories and all my books tell stories.... If I had lived 2,000 years ago I’d be going around to caves, and I’d say, ‘Can I come in? I’m hungry. I’d like some supper. In exchange, I'll tell you a story. Once upon a time there were two apes. ‘And I’d tell them a story about two cavemen.’
One of the most notable things about Gallico’s writing, according to Andrea Park in a review of Love of Seven Dolls, is that it’s power comes from itself as a whole, itself being cumulatively more than the sum of its parts.
She said: “It is difficult to describe and impossible to pinpoint the tenuous, even nebulous word magic that successfully carries a reader into the world of fantasy and make-believe. It is perhaps delineated as a quality, a kind of fragile atmosphere that, once established, cannot be broken. Mr. Gallico creates this atmosphere when he writes the sequences with Mouche and the puppets.”
Paul Gallico died on 15 July 1976, aged 78 in Antibes, France. [edit]
|
|
More General Literature Authors
Chaon, Dan
Forester, CS
Nesbit, E
Tarantino, Quentin
Desai, Anita
View as Title Search
|
