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Runyon was, like Tex, a western migrant to the big city. He was born, by an amusing coincidence, in Manhattan, Kansas, and as a small-town newspaperman he had knocked around the western mining camps— usually reeling drunk—that Tex could only boast about. Runyon wasn’t a florid person, like Tex; he was one of those devastatingly funny people who almost never smile, which is to say that he could be a very disconcerting person. His stoicism, his tough-mindedness, his contempt for the straight and narrow, and his storytelling gifts made him an appealing figure among the hoods and horseplayers and reporters with whom he invariably hung out. Runyon only arrived in New York in 1910, when he was twenty-six. In 1914 he landed a job at William Randolph Hearst’s American, where he remained as sportswriter, feature writer, and columnist until 1928. When he wasn’t in Florida for spring training, or in Chicago for a fight, he could normally be found within the confines of Times Square.

Though Runyon was at least as much a Broadway character as George S. Kaufman or anyone in his circle, one finds very little reference to him in their writings, or to them in his. They occupied different Times Squares, for by this time Times Square had become such a capacious, such a various, place that it could accommodate several very different cultures and could conjure up to the rest of the world a very mixed set of images and associations. There was a lighthearted, witty, and urbane Times Square, and a roguish, slightly sinister Times Square. And this truth was expressed geographically, for Runyon’s Times Square, both the one he wrote about and the one he lived in, was a micro-neighborhood located well to the north of Kaufman’s theatrical world, which was concentrated in and around 42nd Street.

A new Madison Square Garden had gone up in 1925 on Eighth Avenue between 49th and 50th Streets; and the sports fans and promoters and ticket agents and bookies who went to the Garden for prizefights and college basketball games and bicycle races and wrestling matches hung out at the hotels and bars immediately to the east. The sidewalk on the east side of Broadway between 49th and 50th was known as Jacobs Beach, because the fight promoter Mike Jacobs and his pals were wont to camp out there. Both Winchell and Runyon frequently dropped in on the crowd there for local tidings; both men also lived for a time in the rooms above Billy LaHiff’s Tavern on 48th west of Seventh, as did Jack Dempsey and the columnist Bugs Baer. Runyon later removed to the Forrest Hotel, a block to the north, which also hosted the innumerable assignations of the boxer and heartthrob Primo Carnera. Texas Guinan’s various clubs were never more than a few blocks away, and the other great nightclubs of the time, including the Hollywood and the Silver Slipper, were virtually next door. Here was a vast, teeming world that extended no more than a thousand feet in any direction.

If Walter Winchell was Broadway’s town crier, then Damon Runyon was its griot and its folklorist-in-chief. Runyon gave the world a Broadway that was infinitely dense with incident, and yet scaled down to the size of a village. It was an intricate little place where people walked from here to there, saluting their friends and experiencing chance encounters that not infrequently led to their death. “One night,” Runyon writes in “The Brain Goes Home,” “the Brain is walking me up and down Broadway in front of Mindy’s restaurant, and speaking of this and that, when along comes a red-headed raggedy doll selling apples at five cents per copy. . . .” In other stories, the narrator isn’t even going anywhere; he’s just standing outside Mindy’s front door when the neighborhood characters come waltzing down the street, and soon another adventure has begun.

Runyon’s geography was subtly different from Winchell’s. With the help of guides like Tex, and thanks to his own burning ambition, Winchell had left behind the vaudeville shtetl of 47th Street for the beau monde of the clubs