In 1939, Gallico published The Adventures of Hiram Holliday, known for its later television adaptation with Wally Cox in the starring role and Ainslie Pryor as the supporting actor. Once upon a time there were two apes.' And I'd tell them a story about two cavemen.' If I had lived 2,000 years ago I'd be going around to caves, and I'd say, 'Can I come in? I'm hungry. I just like to tell stories and all my books tell stories. Gallico once confessed to New York Magazine, 'I'm a rotten novelist. His novella The Snow Goose, and other works, are expanded versions of his magazine stories.

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 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. He founded the Golden Gloves amateur boxing competition. He became one of the highest-paid sportswriters in America. He followed up with accounts of catching Dizzy Dean's fastball and golfing with Bobby Jones. Gallico described how it felt to be knocked out by the heavyweight champion. Gallico's career was launched by an interview with boxer Jack Dempsey in which he asked Dempsey to spar with him. Gallico graduated from Columbia University in 1919 and first achieved notice in the 1920s as a sportswriter, sports columnist, and sports editor of the New York Daily News. His father was the Italian concert pianist, composer and music teacher Paolo Gallico (Trieste, – New York, July 6, 1950), and his mother, Hortense Erlich, came from Austria they had emigrated to New York in 1895.

The abandoned by paul gallico