Richard Edward Connell Jr.
(October 17, 1893 – November 22, 1949) was an American author and journalist. He is best remembered for his short story “The Most Dangerous Game” (1924). Connell was one of the most popular American short story writers of his time.He was nominated for an Academy Award in 1942 (Best Original Story) for the movie Meet John Doe (1941), directed by Frank Capra and based on his 1922 short story “A Reputation”.
Connell’s improbable tale of a wax museum watchman, “A Friend of Napoleon,” appears in Great American Short Stories: O. Henry Prize Winning Stories 1919-1934. The story is marked as one of the Prize Stories of 1923. A short biography states, “Richard Connell started his career at the age of thirteen by reporting a murder trial for his father’s paper. At fifteen he was a hardened police reporter, sports writer, copy reader, and occasionally smuggled in a few editorials. The father slew hundreds of the son’s adjectives with a blue pencil and taught him to write. Since then he has gone to Harvard, served overseas, and established himself as a short-story writer of distinction.”