Paul William Gallico was born in New York City, the son of an Italian father and an Austria mother who had emigrated to New York in 1895. He graduated from Columbia University in 1919 and became a a sportswriter, sports columnist, and sports editor of the New York Daily News in the 1920s. He became a national celebrity and one of the highest-paid sportswriters in America. In the late 1930s he abandoned sports writing for fiction and found success writing short stories for magazines such as the The Saturday Evening Post. Many of his novels, including The Snow Goose (which won the O. Henry prize for short stories in 1941), are expanded versions of his magazine stories. Over the course of his career, he wrote 41 books and numerous short stories, twenty theatrical movies, twelve TV movies, and had a TV series based on his Hiram Holliday short stories.