When Alfred Damon Runyon moved to New York City, sometime in late 1910, he was thirty years old, a seasoned journalist, and a stranger to the city. Though he had published a handful of short stories in McClure's, Lippincott's, and Metropolitan, and his poetry had appeared in Collier's, he had made his living for almost fifteen years as a writer for newspapers, including the Pueblo Evening Press, the San Francisco Post, and the Denver News. In moving to New York he ended his years of rough-and-tumble journalism and the drinking binges that threatened to doom him to lifelong alcoholism. He began a rise to fame and fortune that, even now, seems phenomenal. Throughout the 1930s he was ranked as America's most popular short-story writer and called the century's greatest journalist. Saturday Evening Post and Collier's paid him their highest fees; Hollywood producers besieged him with rich offers for film...