MAIN Art & Culture Literature

Pop Culture Imitates Life
Through A Writer's Gift
Damon Runyon's Influence on Modern Media

Many of today's TV viewers have no idea who Damon Runyon was.

They watch NYPD Blue and The Sopranos, The Godfather and Gangs of New York without ever making a connection between the humanized, if not lovable, mobsters and the reality that Runyon captured in his work.

The writer and reporter Damon Runyon portrayed New York City's colorful lowlifes of the 1920s and '30s so indelibly that his legacy still lives on in American popular culture.

The younger members of today's audiences may not remember the endearing underworld characters in the 1950s Broadway musical Guys and Dolls, based on Runyon's high-spirited and often hilarious New York stories. Yet, programs like NYPD Blue and The Sopranos have characters based on the glamorized hoodlums of Runyon's prose.

Cornell University Professor of English, Daniel Schwarz, explores the power of Runyon's characters in his new book, Broadway Boogie Woogie: Damon Runyon and the Making of New York City Culture.

He asserts that Americans' continuing interest in archetypes we now call "Runyonesque" can be seen in the popularity of Mario Puzo's gangster novels, Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather movies, Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas and Gangs of New York and Barry Levinson's Bugsy.

Schwarz explains that traces of Runyon's literary creations can still be found everywhere in pop culture.

The tough yet sensitive contemporary Italian-American gangster Tony Soprano of the Home Box Office television series The Sopranos and the cynical yet sentimental police officer Andy Sipowicz of NYPD Blue are typical "Runyonesque" personalities.

Runyon was among the first to, "stylize both the language and the behavior of gangsters and depict them as another part of the socio-economic system, showing how the underworld provided clients with gambling, sex and hard-to-get sports tickets and, during Prohibition, with liquor," says Schwarz.

Runyon's flamboyant street characters, with their aggressive one-line retorts, have shaped people's image of New York City. His influence permeates television programs such as Seinfeld and Sex and the City.

The Woody Allen movie Broadway Danny Rose, "pays specific homage to Runyon's world, where respectability and the demi-monde rub shoulders."

In addition, Runyon's short stories, with their rough-and-tumble characters and gangsters who live by their own code, and the writer's uncanny ability to dissect "the sham beneath the glitter" have contributed to Americans' continuing fascination with the sleazy side of entertainment, sports and sports gambling, and complicit relationships between criminals and the police.

And last, the trial reporting of Runyon, who wrote for the Hearst papers, "contributed to the spectator culture by which we regard such celebrity events as the Lewinsky-Clinton scandal and the O.J. Simpson trial."

Broadway Boogie Woogie: Damon Runyon and the Making of New York City Culture, released by Palgrave Macmillan, is now in bookstores.

Schwarz is a Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow and recipient of the Russell award for distinguished teaching at Cornell. He is the author of numerous books about contemporary modern literature and culture -- including books on James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, Wallace Stevens and the relationship between modern art and modern literature, as well as Holocaust literature. He has lectured widely in the United States and abroad.

More about Damon Runyon around the Web:

Damon Runyon

Damon Runyon - Wikipedia