Paul William Gallico (July 26, 1897 – July 15, 1976) was an American novelist and short story and sports writer. Many of his works were adapted for motion pictures. He is perhaps best remembered for The Snow Goose, his most critically successful book, for the novel The Poseidon Adventure, primarily through the 1972 film adaptation, and for four novels about the beloved character of Mrs. Harris. Early life and career Gallico was born in New York City in 1897. His father was the Italian concert pianist, composer and music teacher Paolo Gallico (Trieste, May 13, 1868 – New York, July 6, 1955), and his mother, Hortense Erlich, came from Austria; they had emigrated to New York in 1895. Gallico's graduation from Columbia University was delayed to 1921, having served a year and a half in the United States Army during World War I. He first achieved notice in the 1920s as a sportswriter, sports columnist, and sports editor of the New York Daily News. In 1937, in Gallico's "Farewell to Sport" he stated, "For all her occasional beauty and unquestioned courage, there has always been something faintly ridiculous about the big-time lady athletes." In the same book, Gallico later explained why he thinks Jewish people are drawn to and good at basketball, "The game places a premium on an alert, scheming mind, flashy trickiness, artful dodging and general smart aleckness." Gallico's career was launched by an interview with boxer Jack Dempsey in which he asked Dempsey to spar with him. Gallico described how it felt to be knocked out by the heavyweight champion. He followed up with accounts of catching Dizzy Dean's fastball and golfing with Bobby Jones. He became one of the highest-paid sportswriters in America. He founded the Golden Gloves amateur boxing competition. His book, Lou Gehrig: Pride of the Yankees (1941) was adapted into the sports movie The Pride of the Yankees (1942), starring Gary Cooper and Teresa Wright. Career as a fiction writer In the late 1930s, he abandoned sports writing for fiction, first writing an essay about this decision entitled "Farewell to Sport" (published in an anthology of his sports writing, also titled Farewell to Sport (1938)), and became a successful writer of short stories for magazines, many appearing in the then-premier fiction outlet, The Saturday Evening Post. His novella The Snow Goose and other works are expanded versions of his magazine stories. Gallico once