Seventy winters ago, a 39-year-old World War II veteran living in Manhattan took the gamble of his life. Armed with a notebook inked with leftover melodies, Johnny Marks settled into a cramped office with an upright Crawford piano on the sixth floor of the Brill Building at Broadway and 49th Street.

The Brill Building was perhaps the most important address in American music, the site of New Yorks sonic resurgence as the big band era eclipsed the once-dominant novelty songwriters from Tin Pan Alley, 20 blocks south. Brill publishers were behind hits for stars including Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller, and some of its songwriters Cole Porter, Irving Berlin were even more famous than the heartthrobs who sang their tunes.

Marks lived at the fringes of this glitz and glamor. He had been struggling to make a name for himself as a songwriter since the Depression, and was finally starting his own publishing operation, St. Nicholas Music, because none of the respectable, established publishing houses would get behind his latest song.

It wasnt hard to see why. His most successful song to date, Happy New Year Darling, was a throwback to the holiday schmaltz and comedy bits that Tin Pan Alley writers were now struggling to get on the air. Nobody remembers it today, and it was already all-but-forgotten in 1949. His newest tune was even goofier a childrens song for Christmas, totally out of step with the jazzy romanticism that dominated the postwar charts. Undeterred, Marks was betting everything that he could rival the biggest names in show business.

It was off to a slow start. Marks had pitched a demo for his new song but the biggest stars werent interested. Both Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby turned him down before Marks got a foot in the door with Gene Autry. The Singing Cowboy himself didnt actually like the song, but his wife loved it, and she talked her husband into recording it as the B-side to another Christmas single he was recording for Columbia Records. By the end of the year, Marks little ditty about a flying red-nosed reindeer named Rudolph was the biggest song in the country.

Crosby released a new version the following year. Then Dean Martin, and then the Supremes and the Temptations. By 1980, more than 500 different renditions had been commercially released. By the end of the century, it was the biggest Christmas song ever written, and so closely identified with the holiday that it is hard for subsequent generations to imagine the holiday without it. No one since Charles Dickens had so profoundly altered the mythology of Christmas itself.

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer was a new fable that embodied the transformation of Christmas from a second-tier Christian holiday into a secular celebration of postwar America. Marks himself wasnt even Christian like many of the great songwriters from the 1950s and 60s, he was Jewish but he understood the way the holiday spirit captured both the optimism and escapism that were overtaking the national mood. America wanted to be a place where anybody could make it, and a story about a skinny reindeer with a funny nose turned toy-delivery hero was perfect for a nation where a booming, consumer-driven economy promised families that tomorrow would always be better than today.

Rudolph celebrated a national ideal that never quite existed. And most Americans still long for it today, even when it has perhaps never been farther from our grasp.