Paul Gallico

Paul Gallico
Paul Gallico, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1937
Born	(1897-07-26)July 26, 1897 New York City, New York, U.S.
Died	July 15, 1976(1976-07-15) (aged 78) Monaco
Occupation	Novelist, short story and sports writer
Spouse(s)	Alva Thoits Taylor (5 September 1921 – 1934) (divorced) Elaine St. Johns (12 April 1935 – 1936) (divorced) Pauline Gariboldi (1939 – 1939) (divorced) Virginia von Falz-Fein (19 July 1963 – 15 July 1976) (his death)

Paul William Gallico (July 26, 1897 – July 15, 1976) was an American novelist, short story and sports writer. Many of his works were adapted for motion pictures. He is perhaps best remembered for The Snow Goose, his only real critical success, and for the novel The Poseidon Adventure, primarily through the 1972 film adaptation.

Gallico was born in New York City. His father was the Italian concert pianist, composer and music teacher Paolo Gallico (Trieste, May 13, 1868 – New York, July 6, 1950), and his mother, Hortense Erlich, came from Austria; they had emigrated to New York in 1895. Gallico graduated from Columbia University in 1919 and first achieved notice in the 1920s as a sportswriter, sports columnist, and sports editor of the New York Daily News.

Gallico's career was launched by an interview with boxer Jack Dempsey in which he asked Dempsey to spar with him. Gallico 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 one of the highest-paid sportswriters in America. He founded the Golden Gloves amateur boxing competition. His book, Lou Gehrig: Pride of the Yankees (1941) was adapted into the sports movie The Pride of the Yankees (1942), starring Gary Cooper and Teresa Wright.

In the late 1930s, he abandoned sports writing for fiction, first writing an essay about this decision entitled "Farewell to Sport" (published in an anthology of his sports writing, also titled Farewell to Sport (1938)), and became a successful writer of short stories for magazines, many appearing in the then-premier fiction outlet, The Saturday Evening Post. His novella The Snow Goose, and other works, are expanded versions of his magazine stories.