Alfred Damon Runyon (October 4, 1880 – December 10, 1946) was an American newspaperman and short-story writer. He spun humorous and sentimental tales of gamblers, hustlers, actors, and gangsters. His distinctive vernacular style is known as “Runyonese”: a mixture of formal speech and colorful slang, almost always in present tense, and always devoid of contractions. The Damon Runyon Theatre dramatized 52 of Runyon’s works in 1949, and for these the protagonist was given the name “Broadway”.
