Paul Gallico

Sports writer, screenwriter and novelist Paul Gallico was born in 1897 in New York City. His parents were immigrants (father from Italy, mother from Austria) who emigrated to the US in 1895. He was educated in the New York City public school system, and entered Columbia University in 1916, graduating in 1921--his education was interrupted by an 18-month stint in the Army during World War I--with a B.S. degree. He soon got a job with the National Board of Motion Picture Reviews, but left after a few months to take a job as the film critic for the New York Daily News. He lost that job because his reviews were considered too "smart alecky" and he wound up in the sports department. One of his assignments was to cover the training camp of champion Jack Dempsey. Rather than just do a "puff-piece" interview with Dempsey, Gallico got a different idea--he would actually spend some sparring time with Dempsey in the ring, to get an idea of what it was like to be in the ring with the world's heavyweight champion. He soon found out--Dempsey knocked him unconscious within two minutes--but he got the story he was looking for, and his sports career took off. In 1923 he was promoted to Sports Editor of the Daily News and received his own daily sports column. His interest in boxing resulted in his organizing the now famous Golden Gloves amateur boxing competition. He became one of the first celebrity sportswriters, but he had always harbored a desire to be a fiction writer, and had occasionally had short stories published in magazines like "Vanity Fair" and the "Saturday Eening Post". In 1936 he sold a story idea to Hollywood for $5000, which gave him the wherewithal to retire from sports writing and devote his full time to fiction writing. He moved to Europe and soon published his first major book, "Farewell to Sport" In 1941 he had his first international best-seller, "The Snow Goose". His writing was interrupted--again--by war, and he spent the years from 1943-46 as a war correspondent. After the war he traveled around Europe and South America--he liked to personally research the locales his stories and novels were set in, and his research took him to such places as Mexico, Liechenstein, Paris and Monaco, where he eventually settled. He spent the last four years of his life in Antibes, a coastal resort area in the south of France between Cannes and Nice. He died there on July 15, 1976, less than two weeks before his 79th birthday.