Paul William Gallico was born in New York City in 1897. He was one of the most well-known sporting writers in America, and a minor celebrity. But he had always wanted to be a fiction writer and eventually retired from sports writing and went to live in Europe to devote himself to writing novels and short stories.Though his name was well-known in the United States, he was unknown to the rest of the world until 1941, when The Snow Goose was published. He died in Antibes in 1976, just short of his 79th birthday.