Wikipedia

Draft:Don Ryan (author)

Don Ryan
Born(1889-09-14)September 14, 1889
Ohio
Died1978(1978-00-00) (aged 88–89)
Los Angeles, California
OccupationNovelist, screenwriter
Alma materWest Virginia University
Notable works
  • Angel's Flight (1927)

Don Ryan (Ohio, 1889 - Los Angeles, 1978) was an American journalist, novelist and screenwriter. He is most remembered today for his 1927 novel Angel's Flight, argued to be "Los Angeles' first hard-boiled novel,"[1] and the one that "got the Los Angeles novel off to its true start".[2]

Life

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Ryan was born in Ohio in 1889, "just across the river from Kentucky".[3] He served as first lieutenant of infantry in WWI, and after moving to California he held jobs as newspaper man, a professional dancer, a vaudeville actor, and an intertitle writer for silent films.[4][5] As a journalist, he contributed to Los Angeles Evening Post-Record and signed columns for Hollywood magazines like Photoplay and Picture Play.

Ryan was good friends with Austrian-American filmmaker Erich Von Stroheim.[6] In time he would become part of the director's small cadre of loyal technicians and assistants, all of them WWI officers, that followed him from film to film.[7] Ryan even had small acting roles in two of Von Stroheim's later films: The Merry Widow (1925) and The Wedding March (1928).[8][9] A character strongly based on Von Stroheim appears in Ryan's first two novels.[10][11]

In August 1927 Boni and Liveright released Ryan's first novel, Angel's Flight. After this he seemed to settle down as a writer; in 1929 he joined the writing staff at Vitaphone.[12] Between 1932 and 1941 he is credited in several feature films. He frequently collaborated with Iowa-born screenwriter Kenneth Gamet (1903-1971), with whom he is credited for a string of mystery and crime dramas, many of them directed by William Clemens or Frank MacDonald.[13]

Works

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Angel's Flight (1927)

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Ryan's first novel Angel's Flight, after the funicular in the Bunker Hill District of LA, was the most highly regarded of his books and his most remembered, with historian and California's State Librarian Kevin Starr singling it out in his "Americans and the California Dream" series.[2] One of the first novels to "repudiate" the paradise-like vision of Southern California,[14] it has been called "Los Angeles' first hard-boiled novel", anticipating the raw, detached portrayals of 1930s novelists like James M. Cain, Horace McCoy, and Raymond Chandler.[15]

Drawing heavily from Ryan's own experience, the book is less a novel than a series of vignettes adding up to a cynical portrait of a city of "boosters, bums, and crooks".[16] The plot concerns a returned World War I veteran who slowly climbs his way into Hollywood.[17] Several characters are modeled after real media personalities at the time, among them evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson[18] and writer and naturalist Gene Stratton-Porter[16]. A figure portrayed in an unusually flattering light is director Erich Von Stroheim: a subplot deals with a filmmaker named Karl Von Stechmann clashing with a studio over the production of his magnum opus, titled The Siren—a rewriting of Stroheim's difficulties in filming and preserving the original ten-hour cut of his 1924 masterpiece Greed.[11][17]

Later works

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Ryan's second book, A Roman Holiday (unrelated to the film with Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn), is somewhat similar to the first in its themes, although with a female protagonist. The story narrates her rise from a seedy nightclub to the movie industry, and her subsequent fall from grace. The New York Times called it "a lurid, arty scenario," warning that "scarcely a sequence would get past the censorship".[19] The New Yorker critic Agnes W. Smith called the novel "a story of the less chaste aspects of the film colony", and thought Ryan had "unusual talent, once he overcomes his temptation to be shocking".[20]

Ryan's last two novels suppose a considerable departure from those themes, rather fitting the historical genre, and are far less obscure. 1937's The Warrior's Path is a "native captivity" novel that follows a young boy captured by hostile Native Americans.[21] 1954's The Devil's Brigadier reimagines the career of the Harpe Brothers (18th century highwaymen and river pirates) and is set along the Mississippi River. [22] Kirkus called it "hot blooded and spirited."[23]

Novels

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  • Angel's Flight (Boni and Liveright, 1927)
  • A Roman Holiday (Macaulay, 1930)
  • The Warrior's Path (Duckworth & Co., 1937)
  • The Devil's Brigadier (Coward-McCann, 1954)

Films

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(All as screenwriter unless otherwise indicated)

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References

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  1. ↑ Fine, David (2000). Imagining Los Angeles: A City in Fiction. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. ISBN 0826322077.
  2. 1 2 Starr, Kevin (1997). The Dream Endures: California Enters the 1940s. New York: Oxford University Press. p. 296. ISBN 0195100794.
  3. ↑ Ryan, Don (1930). A Roman Holiday. New York: Macaulay.
  4. ↑ "Newest Books and Book Reviews" (PDF). Winnetka Talk. 14 May 1927. p. 32. Retrieved 5 March 2026.
  5. ↑ "Books and Authors". The New York Times. 22 May 1927. p. 16. Retrieved 5 March 2026.
  6. ↑ Koszarski, Richard (1983). The Man You Loved to Hate: Erich Von Stroheim and Hollywood. New York: Oxford University Press. p. 141. ISBN 019503239X.
  7. ↑ Koszarski, p. 168.
  8. ↑ "The Merry Widow". AFI Catalog. American Film Institute. Retrieved 5 March 2026.
  9. ↑ "The Wedding March". Silent Era. Retrieved 5 March 2026.
  10. ↑ Brook, Vincent (2013). Land of Smoke and Mirrors: A Cultural History of Los Angeles. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. pp. 111–2. ISBN 9780813554570. Retrieved 8 March 2026.
  11. 1 2 Koszarski, p. 306.
  12. ↑ "Ryan and Hobble Sign to Write Vitaphone Sketches". Motion Picture News. 13 July 1929. p. 194-A. Retrieved 5 March 2026.
  13. ↑ "Gamet (Kenneth) papers, 1940-1970". Online Archive of California. University of California. Retrieved 13 March 2026.
  14. ↑ Maher, Sean W. (2021). Film Noir and Los Angeles: Urban History and the Dark Imaginary. New York: Routledge. p. 51. ISBN 9781138304567. Retrieved 13 March 2026.
  15. ↑ Fine, David (2004). Imagining Los Angeles: A City in Fiction. Reno: University of Nevada Press. p. 71. ISBN 0874176034.
  16. 1 2 Fine, p. 70.
  17. 1 2 Brook, pp. 110–4.
  18. ↑ Daley, Christine M. (2006). Urban Fervor: Los Angeles Literature and Alternative Religion (Philosophy thesis). New York: City University of New York. pp. 71–72. Retrieved 5 March 2026.
  19. ↑ ""Spider Web" and Other Recent Works of Fiction". The New York Times. 26 January 1930. Retrieved 5 March 2026.
  20. ↑ Smith, Agnes W. (8 February 1930). "Reviews of "Backwater," by T. S. Stribling, "Pure Gold," by O. E. Rolvaag, "Free," by Blair Niles, "Tiger! Tiger!," by Honore Willsie Morrow, and other books". The New Yorker. Retrieved 5 March 2026.
  21. ↑ "The Warrior's Path". Cox & Budge Booksellers. Retrieved 13 March 2026.
  22. ↑ Woodbridge, Wensley C. (April 1956). "The Kentucky Novel: 1951-5". Register of the Kentucky Historical Society. 54 (187): 140. Retrieved 13 March 2026.
  23. ↑ "The Devil's Brigadier". Kirkus Reviews. Retrieved 13 March 2026.

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