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Considered Opinion. The early Runyon shows talents of two kinds: he might have written boys' stories with the charm and freshness of Booth Tarkington's Penrod books, or he might have become a Lardner-like realist in vernacular. Instead, he mastered a highly successful formula...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Books: The Hired Rebel | 8/1/1949 | See Source »

...when Damon Runyon wrote his last stories, they had become as predictably stylized as a Balinese dance. His Broadway heroes, for example, were called Sam the Gonoph, Harry the Horse or Gigolo Georgie; they could calculate the death of a pal as coldly as the third race at Jamaica-but in Runyon's last-paragraph twists and hooks they always proved to have hearts of gold...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Books: The Hired Rebel | 8/1/1949 | See Source »

Latter-day Runyon creatures spoke a language of their own, a dialect which showed traces of remote English ancestry but which, despite its lack of formal grammar, was curiously courtly in its rhythms. When a Runyon character wanted to say that a tout had left money to his girl friend to buy him a tombstone, he said, "I am under the impression that he leaves Beatrice well loaded as far as the do-re-mi is concerned and I take it for granted that she handles the stone situation." In Runyonese there was only one tense, the universal present...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Books: The Hired Rebel | 8/1/1949 | See Source »

Diverting Frankenstein. Damon Runyon's Broadway stories were highly readable and amusing; to a large following, they stood for incisive reporting of U.S. big-city life. But, as he himself seemed to know, Runyon had created a kind of literary Frankenstein: the formula that brought him fame and money also limited his growth as a writer...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Books: The Hired Rebel | 8/1/1949 | See Source »

...Runyon First and Last, a collection of his earliest and last pieces, there are two mildly amusing Broadway stories and over three dozen sketches written between 1907 and 1915 in Runyon's youthful, pre-formula days. One of them, a hobo story called "The Informal Execution of Soupbone Pew," is a report of a murder told in a bantering tone reminiscent of Ring Lardner. Others are gentle spoofs on his old home town in the West, sketches of Army life in the Spanish-American War, or idyllic reminiscences of childhood...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Books: The Hired Rebel | 8/1/1949 | See Source »

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