Damon Runyon

Alfred Damon Runyon (4 October 1880 – 10 December 1946) was an American journalist and short-story writer who created one of the most distinctive prose styles in American literature — a present-tense, past-tense-avoiding, elaborately polite slang spoken by gamblers, gangsters, showgirls, bookmakers, and Broadway characters of dubious occupation — and whose stories inspired the musical Guys and Dolls (1950), one of the supreme achievements of the American musical theatre.

Life

Runyon was born in Manhattan, Kansas, and raised in Pueblo, Colorado. He enlisted in the U.S. Army at fourteen and served in the Spanish-American War. He began his career as a newspaper reporter in Colorado, Denver, and San Francisco before moving to New York in 1910, where he joined the Hearst newspaper chain and became one of the city’s most prominent journalists.

He covered sports (particularly boxing and horse racing), crime, and trials for the New York American and other Hearst papers. His coverage of major trials — including the Lindbergh kidnapping trial and the trial of Al Capone — was widely read. He knew many of the actual gangsters and gamblers who populated his fiction, and his access to the New York underworld gave his stories their authenticity.

He died of throat cancer — after a lifetime of coffee and cigarettes (he did not drink alcohol) — and his ashes were scattered over Broadway from an airplane.

The Broadway Stories

Runyon’s short stories, published primarily in Collier’s and The Saturday Evening Post from the 1920s through the 1940s, are set in a Broadway demimonde of illegal gambling joints, nightclubs, racetracks, and hotel lobbies. The cast includes Harry the Horse, Nicely-Nicely Jones, Nathan Detroit, Big Jule, the Lemon Drop Kid, and dozens of other characters whose names alone announce the world they inhabit.

The stories’ most distinctive feature is their prose style — “Runyonesque” has entered the language as a descriptive term. The narrator speaks exclusively in the present tense (never “he said” but “he says”), avoids contractions, uses elaborate circumlocutions instead of simple words (“a certain party” instead of “someone,” “more than somewhat” instead of “very”), and maintains a tone of courtly politeness even when describing violence, swindles, and criminal enterprise. The style is a work of art — a literary creation as distinctive as Wodehouse’s or Hemingway’s.

The stories’ content is equally original. Runyon’s gangsters are sentimental, superstitious, and bound by an elaborate code of honour. They are frightening when they need to be, but they are also funny, generous, and capable of unexpected tenderness. The stories are not realistic — real gangsters did not talk or behave like Runyon’s characters — but they create a self-consistent fictional world that is as vivid and complete as Dickens’s London.

Guys and Dolls

The musical Guys and Dolls (1950), with book by Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows, music and lyrics by Frank Loesser, is based primarily on two Runyon stories: “The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown” (in which a gambler falls in love with a Salvation Army worker) and “Blood Pressure.” It is one of the most frequently revived musicals in the world and has kept Runyon’s name in circulation.

Critical Standing

Runyon is a unique figure in American letters — too literary for journalism, too journalistic for the literary establishment, and too funny for either to take entirely seriously. His prose style is inimitable (many have tried) and his stories have the quality of folk art: simple, stylised, and endlessly repeatable. His influence extends through film noir, the musical, and the tradition of American comic writing.

Collecting Runyon

Guys and Dolls (1931, Stokes) in first edition brings $200–$800. Blue Plate Special (1934) and other story collections bring $50–$200. Runyon’s journalism is not widely collected.