Irwin Shaw Biography and List of Works

Prolific American playwright, screenwriter, and author of international bestsellers, of which the best-known are THE YOUNG LIONS (1948), one of the most famous novels about World War II, RICH MAN, POOR MAN (1970), and BEGGAR, THIEF (1977). Critics have generally agreed that Shaw was a masterful storyteller, but also observed that his commercial fiction hurt his literary reputation. As a short story writer with the skill to create memorable characters Shaw have been compared to Hemingway, John Cheever, and John O'Hara.

  'Segal,' said the major, 'after this war is over, it will be necessary to salvage Europe. We will all have to live together on the same continent. At the basis of that, there must be forgiveness. I know it is impossible to forgive everyone, but there are millions who never did anything...'
   'Like you?'
   'Like me,' said the German. 'I was never a member of the Party. I lived a quiet middle-class existence with my wife and three children.'
   'I am getting very tired,' Segal said, 'of your wife and three children.'
(from Retreat and Other Stories, 1970)

Irwin Shaw was born in Bronx in New York to Jewish immigrants from Russia. His parents, William Shamforoff and Rose (Tompkins) Shamforoff, changed their family's name to Shaw and moved to Brooklyn, where Irwin spent most of his childhood. He was educated at the Brooklyn College and graduated with a B.A. in 1934. During these years Shaw wrote for the school newspaper and started his career as a writer at age 21 by producing scripts for radio shows, adapting episodes for "Dick Tracy". His first play, BURY THE DEAD, an anti-war story in which six soldiers killed in battle rise from their graves, was produced in 1936 as his screenplay, THE BIG GAME. Shaw's co-operation with experimental Group Theatre continued in 1939 with THE GENTLE PEOPLE. In 1946 his play THE ASSASSIN closed early due to negative criticism and he abandoned playwriting for a number of years. Between 1947 and 1948 he wrote drama criticism for New Republic, in Washington D.C.

In the late 1930s Shaw wrote stories for such magazines as The New Yorker and Esquire. These 'socially conscious' tales also appeared in book form, THE SAILOR OFF THE BREMEN in 1939 and WELCOME TO THE CITY in 1942. The collections contain some of his best works, including 'The Sailor off the Bremen', 'The Girls in their Summer Dresses', 'Second Mortgage', and 'The Eighty-Yard Run'. They are now considered 20th-century American classics as enduring as those by John Cheever, John O'Hara, and J.D. Salinger.

During World War II Shaw served in the U.S. Army, becoming a warrant officer. In 1947-48 he was an instructor in creative writing at New York University. Shaw's war experiences in Europe provided the basis for his novel THE YOUNG LIONS (1948), which became a huge success. Shaw served in North Africa and Europe and witnessed the liberation of Paris as a member of a documentary film unit. The Young Lions is a panorama of the conflict in Europe, told from the perspectives of one German and two American soldiers.

In 1951 Shaw's second novel was published, THE TROUBLED AIR, depicting the rise of McCarthyism. In the same year he left the United States, living for the next 25 years in Europe in such locations as Paris, the Riviera, and various Swiss resorts. He continued to write several bestsellers, including TWO WEEKS IN ANOTHER TOWN (1960), EVENING IN BYZANTIUM (1973), which depicts a Hollywood producer who goes to Cannes to test his screenplay, and RICH MAN, POOR MAN (1970), a modern Cain and Abel story, that was also adapted into a television series. The story follows an upstate New York family and takes the reader from the post-war years to the troubles and complexities of the present. In ACCEPTABLE LOSES (1982) a small incident changes the life of the protagonist. Roger Damon, a literary agent, receives a mysterious telephone call. It starts the process of Damon's self-examination, in which he must face his past and his mistakes, a plot device Shaw employs in his earlier novel BREAD UPON THE WATERS (1981), in which a rich lawyer starts to fulfil the wishes of an ordinary family but his generosity has unforeseen consequences.

"In essence, then, Bread Upon The Water is a summation of what Mr. Shaw has learned to date about the world surrounding him and the people who inhabit it. He has learned a great deal and has thoughtfully assimilated it. In today's critical climate, the word ''professional'' has taken on negative overtones. Irwin Shaw is a thorough professional, a word used here with admiration and respect."
(Evan Hunter in The New York Times, August 23, 1981)

Two Weeks in Another Town is the story of Jack Andrus, a Hollywood star and an alcoholic, at the crossroads of his life. In the course of two weeks he is forced to relieve his past in the international film colony in Rome; Andrus encounters his old wife Carlotta, and a new mistress, the young and beautiful Veronica. He is also reunited with his former friend, the brilliant and corrupt movie director who put Andrus at the top of his profession, and then helped to destroy him. The book was adapted for the screen in 1962.

"That is," Jack read, "an American, starting at any given point, believes that his career must go from success to success. In the American artist, of any kind, it is the equivalent of the optimistic businessman's greed of the continually expanding economy. The intermittent failure, the cadenced rise and fall of the level of a man's work, which is accepted and understood by the European artist, is fiercely rejected as a normal picture of the process of creation. A dip is not a dip to an American artist, it is a descent into an abyss, an offence against his native moeurs and his compatriots' most dearly held beliefs. In America, the normal incidence of failure, either real or imagined, private or public, which must be expected in such a chancy and elusive endeavour as writing novels or putting on plays or directing motion pictures in regarded, even by the artist himself, as evidence of guilt, as self-betrayal."
(from Two Weeks in Another Town)

Shaw received several award, including O Henry awards for 'Walking Wounded' (1944) and 'Gunner's Passage' (second prize, 1945), National Institute of Arts and Letters grant (1946), and Playboy award (1964, 1970, 1979). In 1976 he left France and began a dual residency in Southampton, Long Island, and Klosters, Switzerland. Shaw died on May 16, 1984 in Davos, Switzerland.

For further reading: Contemporary Popular Writers, ed. by David Mote (1997); World Authors 1900-1950, ed. by Martin Seymour-Smith and Andrew C. Kimmens (1996); Irwin Shaw: A Biography by M. Shnanyerson; Irwin Shaw by J. R. Giles (1983) - Note: Universal television novelizations from 1976 based bestsellers: Rich Man, Poor Man; Once An Eagle; The Rhineman Exchange; Seventh Avenue; 79 Park Avenue; Aspen; Wheels; The Dark Secret of Harvest Home; Brave New World (1979); Women in White

Films:

• THE BIG GAME, 1936
• OUT OF THE FOG, 1941 (play basis only)
• THE TALK OF THE TOWN, 1942 (with Sidney Buchman)
• THE HARD WAY, 1942 (with Daniel Fuchs and Jerry Wald)
• THE COMMANDOS STRIKE AT DAWN, 1943
• EASY LIVING, 1949 (with Charles Schnee, original story only)
• TAKE ONE FALSE STEP, 1949 (with Chester Erskine and David Shaw, original story only)
• I WANT YOU, 1951
• ACT OF LOVE, 1953
• ULISSE/ULYSSESS, 1954 (with others)
• WAR AND PEACE, 1956 (uncredited) - film 1956, based on Leo Tolstoy's novel, dir. by King Vidor (battle scenes) and Mario Soldati
• TIP ON A DEAD JOCKEY, 1957 (novel basis only)
• FIRE DOWN BELOW, 1957
• THE YOUNG LIONS, 1958 (novel basis only)
• DESIRE UNDER THE ELMS, 1958 - based on Eugene O'Neill's play, dir. by Delbert Mann
• LE DIGA SOL PACIFICO/THIS ANGRY AGE/THE SEA WALL, 1958 (with Rene Clement)
• THE BIG GAMBLE, 1961
• TWO WEEKS IN ANOTHER TOWN, 1962 (novel basis only)
• IN THE FRENCH STYLE, 1963 (also co-prod.)
• SURVIVAL 1967, 1968
• THREE, 1969 (story basis only)
• THE TOP OF THE HILL, 1980 (teleplay, adapted from his own novel)

BURY THE DEAD, (1936)
EVENING IN BYZANTIUM, (1973)
NIGHTWORK, (1975)
PARIS! PARIS!, (1977)
BEGGAR, THIEF, (1977)
SHORT STORIES: FIVE DECADES, (1978)
THE TOP OF THE HILL, (1979)
BREAD UPON THE WATERS, (1981)
PARIS/MAGNUM: PHOTOGRAPHS, (1935)
ACCEPTABLE LOSES, (1982)
THE BIG GAME, (1936)
SURVIVAL, (1967)
THREE, (1969)
THE TOP OF THE HILL, (1980)