Author, Guys and Dolls

Damon Runyon was a New York storyteller, newspaperman and sportswriter whose literary legacy includes more than 700 stories, novellas, plays, articles, essays and poems. He’s most famous for his short stories that celebrated the world of Broadway in New York City during Prohibition. Two of them, “The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown” and “Blood Pressure,” form the basis of Loesser and Burrows’ musical, Guys and Dolls. The musical has been staged in more than 25 countries and is performed 3,000 times annually in high schools, universities, community and regional theatres, making it one of the most produced professional and amateur musicals of all times. Other films adapted from his stories include Little Miss Marker, Sorrowful Jones, Forty Pounds of Trouble, Pocketful of Miracles, Lady for a Day, The Lemon Drop Kid, Bloodhounds of Broadway. He also wrote a play (with Howard Lindsay), A Slight Case of Murder. The Damon Runyon Theater radio series dramatized 52 of Runyon's short stories in weekly broadcasts that ran in the 1940s and 1950s.