| |
Paul William Gallico was born in New
York City, on July 26, 1897, two years after his Italian father
and Austrian mother emigrated to the Us. Paul would be educated
in the public schools of New York, and in 1916 went to Columbia
University. He graduated in 1921 with a Bachelor of Science
degree, having lost a year and a half due to World War I. He
then worked for the National Board of Motion Picture Review,
and after six months took a
job as the motion picture critic for
the New York Daily News and would later move to the spoarts
department. During his stint there, he was sent to cover the
training camp of Jack Dempsey, and decided to ask Dempsey if
he could spar with him, to get an idea of what it was like to
be hit by the world heavyweight champion. The results were spectacular;
Gallico was knocked out within
two minutes. But he had his story, and from there his sports-writing
career never looked back. He became Sports Editor of the Daily
News in 1923,
and was given a daily sports column.
He also invented and organised the Golden Gloves amateur boxing
competition. During this part of his life, he was one of the
most well-known sporting writers in America, and a minor celebrity.
But he had always wanted to be a fiction writer, and was writing
short stories and sports articles for magazines like Vanity
Fair and the Saturday Evening Post. In 1936, he sold a short
story to the movies for $5000, which gave him a stake.
So he retired from sports writing,
and went to live in Europe, to devote himself to writing. His
first major book was Farewell to Sport, which
as the title indicates, was his farewell to sports writing.
Though his name was well-known in the United States, he was
an unknown in the rest of the world. In 1941, the Snow
Goose changed all that, and he became, if not a best-selling
author by today's standards, a writer who was always in demand.
Apart from a short spell as a war correspondent between 1943
and 1946, he was a full-time freelance writer for the rest of
his life. He has lived all over the place, including England,
Mexico, Lichtenstein and Monaco, and he lived in Antibes for
the last years of his life. He was a first-class fencer, and
a keen deep-sea fisherman. He would author more than 30 books
in his lifetime. The Poseidon Adventure would
be publised in 1969, and it's sequel Beyond the Poseidon
Adventure would be published almost 10 years later in
1978. A few of his other novels were turned into movies as well,
including Mrs. 'Arris Goes to Paris. He was married
four times, and had several children. He died in Antibes on
15th July, 1976, just short of his 79th birthday. l
|
