Don Ryan was born in 1889 in Fayette Township, the youngest child of John J. Ryan and Vessa McKee. His father and two sisters died of typhoid fever within a year of each other before Don turned 11, after which he and his mother moved to Ironton from the small community of Ryansville where his father and then his mother had been postmaster.
Don graduated from Ironton High School in 1909 and then studied English at the University of West Virginia for two years before embarking on a career as a journalist. He wrote for several papers in different Ohio cities while also pursuing artistic interests—namely dancing and writing experimental fiction. He studied dance in New York with Vernon and Irene Castle, embarked on a series of dance exhibitions in Ohio, Indiana and surrounding states, and also wrote fiction that was rejected for being too bizarre and too realistic.
When America entered World War I, Don entered officer training school and came out as a First Lieutenant. He was sent to France as part of one of the Pioneer Brigades—African American soldiers under the supervision of white officers. Among his unit’s duties was the burying of the dead, as well as disinterring the dead, relocating the bodies to proper military cemeteries, and reinterring them once the war had ended.
After the war, he returned briefly to Ohio but then moved to Los Angeles where he tried his hand at playwriting and managing a theater before taking a job as a reporter and later a columnist for the Los Angeles Record.
He married Thelma “Bobbie” Bobenmeyer, a dancer, actress and fellow Ohio native, in 1924.
After leaving the Record in 1925, Ryan revised many of his columns from the paper, adding to them and rearranging them into a narrative about life in Los Angeles. The result was his first published novel, Angel’s Flight, in 1927. A second novel about Hollywood—A Roman Holiday—followed in 1930.
At the same time that he was working on his books, Ryan also developed a friendship with the Austrian film director, Erich von Stroheim, who cast Ryan in small roles in The Merry Widow (1925) and The Wedding March (1928). These experiences led to jobs writing the titles for silent western films and, later, several films at Warner Brothers and other studios.
In poor health for some time, Bobbie Ryan died in 1937. The year after, Ryan published his third novel, The Warrior’s Path, a Native American captivity tale whose handling of the theme was more straightforward than American publishers were interested in. Ryan was able to publish the book only in the UK.
He remarried in 1940 and settled back into journalism once World War II broke out. One more novel, another work of historical fiction called The Devil’s Brigadier, was released in 1954. Shortly thereafter, Ryan retired to the nearby mountain resort of Lake Arrowhead with the intention of writing more novels, but none were ever forthcoming.
By 1970, failing health forced a return to Los Angeles where he died in 1978, his work all but forgotten. Although he had written for every major Los Angeles newspaper during his 36 years of working in California, none of the surviving papers marked his passing. In the ensuing years, scholars have noted the importance of his first two novels for their innovative and unflinching portrayal of life in 1920s Los Angeles and Hollywood, but his work still remains relatively unknown.
written by Richard Levesque