Twenty gritty stories by the Academy Award–winning writer of On the Waterfront and A Face in the Crowd.
Despite growing up among Hollywood’s most powerful producers and movie stars in the 1920s and ’30s, Budd Schulberg was always a populist at heart. In this collection of his best short fiction, Schulberg takes readers from the halls of privilege in Los Angeles to smoky dives and dockyard slums in New York. His eye for detail and nose for trouble render characters as vividly as a Weegee photograph. These stories also represent the great clash of people and ideas in mid-century America. The collection includes “The Arkansas Traveler,” the story Schulberg adapted into the influential, prescient film A Face in the Crowd starring Andy Griffith. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Budd Schulberg including rare images and never-before-seen documents from the author’s estate.
Budd Schulberg (1914–2009) was a screenwriter, novelist, and journalist who is best remembered for the classic novels What Makes Sammy Run?, The Harder They Fall,and the story On the Waterfront, which he adapted as a novel, play, and an Academy Award–winning film script. Born in New York City, Schulberg grew up in Hollywood, where his father, B. P. Schulberg, was head of production at Paramount, among other studios. Throughout his career, Schulberg worked as a journalist and essayist, often writing about boxing, a lifelong passion. Many of his writings on the sport are collected in Sparring with Hemingway (1995). Other highlights from Schulberg’s nonfiction career include Moving Pictures (1981), an account of his upbringing in Hollywood, and Writers in America (1973), a glimpse of some of the famous novelists he met early in his career. He died in 2009.