Short Fiction Hellinger, Mark: Mark Hellinger's Broadway, 1936-1954, v1, 6 July 2026

[Pulpmeister]

MARK Hellinger (1903-1947) lived a short but exciting life. In 1925, aged just 22, he was hired by The New York Daily News to do the "About Town" weekly column, intended to be filled with news and gossip about Broadway. Instead, Hellinger wrote short-short stories with a twist in the tail, in the O. Henry mode. Later they became a daily feature.

The stories were very popular and by the 1930s were syndicated and sold to many other newspapers. He is reputed to have written some 6,000 of them.
He went on to become a Broadway producer, marry glamorous Ziegfield Follies girl Gladys Glad, then became a Hollywood producer of movies such as The Roaring Twenties (Jimmy Cagney and Humphrey Bogart), The Killers (Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner), and The Naked City, a police procedural shot almost entirely on the streets of New York, instead of using a studio backlot. His narration, with his New York accent, and the catchline "There are ten million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them" became famous.

I have previously produced 2 volumes of Mark Hellinger's short-short stories: Mark Hellinger's Broadway, 1930s. and Mark Hellinger's Broadway, 1940s. They each contained 100 stories. Like this volume, the stories all appeared in Australian newspapers under syndication. I originally searched the online papers using paramaters "Mark Hellinger" and "more than 1000 words." A great many of his stories were between 850 and 1000 words and therefore not discovered. Also, due to the automatic OCR used for digitising the Australian National Library's vast newspaper collection, some turned out to be indexed as "Bellinger"and "Heilinger".

This third volume takes advantage of a wider search, and like the other two volumes contains 100 short-short stories.

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