The Snow Goose

About Author

Paul Gallico was born in New York City in 1897, of Italian and Austrian parentage, and later attended Columbia University. From 1922 to 1936 he worked on the New York Daily News as sports editor, columnist and assistant managing editor. In 1936 he bought a house on top of a hill at Salcombe in South Devon and settled down with a Great Dane and twenty-three assorted cats. It was in 1941 that he made his name with The Snow Goose, a classic story of Dunkirk that became a world-wide bestseller. Having served as a gunner’s mate in the US Navy in 1918, he was again active as a war correspondent with the American Expeditionary Force in 1944. Paul Gallico, who later lived in Monaco, was a first-class fencer and a keen sea-fisherman. He wrote over forty books, among them: The Adventures of Hiram Holliday (1939), The Lonely (1947), Jennie (1950), Trial by Terror (1952), The Small Miracle (1952), The Foolish Immortals (1953), Thomasina (1957), The Hurricane Story (1959), Too Many Ghosts (1961), The Story of Silent Night (1967), The Poseidon Adventure (1969), Matilda (1970), Zoo Gang (1971) and Matilda in the Wilderness (1975). A posthumous work, Beyond the Poseidon Adventure, was published in 1978. Penguin also publishes a volume of collected novels, The World of Mrs Harris. Paul Gallico died in 1976.