Runyon redux
Occurs to me I never did post a followup/summary for my Damon Runyon survey of a couple months ago.
As usual, I didn't do a very good job of designing the survey, so the results aren't terribly easy to interpret. However, it looks to me like the options I would paraphrase as "I recognized Runyon's name but I wasn't familiar with his work," "the style was familiar but the name was unfamiliar," and "I'd never heard the name or encountered the style" don't have much overlap, and together those options add up to about 65% of the total number of respondents. So I think it's probably safe to say that roughly 2/3 of the respondents had no more than a vague awareness of the man or his work.
Other responses suggest to me that perhaps a little under a third of the respondents were at least somewhat (and sometimes more than somewhat) familiar with both the name and the style. Not as high a percentage as I would've expected before that day, but still higher than I'd begun to expect by the time I put that survey together.
Thanks to all participants! I don't really have any further comments at the moment, except to reiterate that if you haven't read Runyon and you have any interest in unusual prose styles, you really ought to go look him up.
Hmm. Now I'm thinking Runyonesque would make a good style for a zeppelin story. Oh, but they don't want parody or pastiche. Alas.
