Star reporter turned short story writer whose distinctive style of writing and verbiage helped popularize such phrases on "croak" (as in "to die"), "put up your dukes", "monkey business" and "drop dead". Runyon's colorful big-city characters--often gangsters or bookies who were tough on the outside, but generally pure mush on the inside--spoke a unique variation on Brooklynese as they enacted cynical yet whimsical comic situations. "Runyonesque" entered the lexicon to describe the author's distinctive universe, which inspired and influenced an incredible amount of multimedia entertainment in
