Paul Gallico

Paul William Gallico (July 26, 1897-July 15, 1976) was a fabulously successful author of popular short stories and novels, many of which were adapted for motion pictures. He is perhaps best remembered for the story The Snow Goose, which was his only real critical success, and the for motion picture based on his novel "The Poseidon Adventure."

He first achieved notability in the 1920s as a sportswriter, sports columnist, and sports editor of the New York Daily News. His career was launched by a interview with boxer Jack Dempsey in which he asked Dempsey to spar with him, and described how it felt to be knocked out by the heavyweight champion. He followed up with accounts of Catching Dizzy Dean's fastball and golfing with Bobby Jones. He became a national celebrity and one of the highest-paid sportswriters in America. He founded the Golden Gloves amateur boxing competition. His 1942 book, Lou Gehrig: Pride of the Yankees was adapted into a classic sports movie.

In the late 1930s he abandoned sportswriting for fiction, and became an extremely successful writer of short stories for magazines, many appearing in the then-premier fiction outlet, the Saturday Evening Post. Many of his novels, including The Snow Goose, are expanded versions of his magazine stories.

Gallico once told New York Magazine "I'm a rotten novelist. I'm not even literary. 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."

The Snow Goose was published in 1940 in The Saturday Evening Post and won an O. Henry prize for short stories in 1941. Critic Robert van Gelder called it "perhaps the most sentimental story that ever has achieved the dignity of a Borzoi [prestige imprint of publisher Knopf] imprint. It is a timeless legend that makes use of every timeless appeal that could be crowded into it."

His story, "Love of Seven Dolls" was adapted into the 1953 motion picture Lili, which starred Leslie Caron, and then subsequently into a musical, Carnival!, with Anna Maria Alberghetti. It concerns a naive adolescent girl who is about to commit suicide, and is dissuaded when she hears kind words from puppet in a carnival puppet show.

The Silent Miaow 1964 purports to be a guide written by a cat, "translated from the feline," on how to obtain, captivate, and dominate a human family. Illustrated with photographs by Suzanne Szasz, it is considered a classic by cat lovers. Other Gallico cat books include Jennie 1950, Thomasina: The Cat Who Thought She Was God 1957 (filmed in 1964 as The Three Lives of Thomasina), and The Honorable Cat 1972.

His 1969 book, The Poseidon Adventure, about a group of passengers attempting to escape from a capsized ocean liner, attracted little attention at the time. The New York Times gave it a one-paragraph review, noting that "Mr. Gallico collects a Grand Hotel [a reference to the 1930 Vicki Baum novel]] full of shipboard dossiers. These interlocking histories may be damp with sentimentality as well as brine—but the author's skill as a storyteller invests them with enough suspense to last the desperate journey." In contrast, Irwin Allen's motion picture was immediately recognized as a great movie of its kind. In his article "What makes 'Poseidon' Fun?", reviewer Vincent Canby coined the term "ark movie" for the genre including Airport (movie), The High and the Mighty, A Night to Remember, Titanic (the 1953 movie, of course), and Phone Call from a Stranger. He wrote that "the Poseidon Adventure puts the Ark Movie back where God intended it to be, in the water. Not flying around in the air on one engine or with a hole in its side." The movie was enormously successful, spawned a whole decade of disaster movies, and is a cult classic today.

References

• The New York Times, Aug 24, 1969; pg. BR26: The Poseidon Adventure
• The New York Times, Jan 14, 1973, p. 121: What Makes 'Poseidon' Fun? (Vincent Canby)
• The New York Times, Jul 7, 1976, p. 20: Paul Gallico, Sportswriter And Author, Is Dead at 78 by Molly Ivins
• Madison Public Library's list of "Tearjerkers"

External links

• The Literature of Paul Gallico