Building on his Academy Award-winning screenplay of the classic film, Budd Schulberg's On the Waterfront is the story of ex-prizefighter Terry Malloy's valiant stand against corruption on the New Jersey docks. It generates all the power, grittiness, and truth of that great production, but goes beyond it in set and setting. It is a novel of strength and fallibility, of hope and defeat, of love and betrayal. In his Introduction, Mr. Schulberg writes: "The film's concentration on a single dominating character, brought close to the camera eye, made it esthetically inconvenient, if not impossible, to set Terry's story in its social and historical perspective...suggesting the knotted complexities of the world of the waterfront that loops around New York."

Considered by some to be Budd Schulberg's masterpiece, "The Disenchanted" tells the tragic story of Manley Halliday, a fabulously successful writer during the 1920s--a golden figure in a golden age--who by the late 1930s is forgotten by the literary establishment, living in Hollywood and writing for the film industry. Halliday is hired to work on a screenplay with a young writer in his twenties named Shep, who is desperate for success and idolizes Halliday. The two are sent to New York City, where a few drinks on the plane begin an epic disintegration on the part of Halliday due to the forces of alcoholism he is heroically fighting against and the powerful draw of memory and happier times. Based in part on a real-life and ill-fated writing assignment between the author and F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1939, Schulberg's novel is at its heart a masterful depiction of Manley Halliday--at times bitter, at others sympathetic and utterly sorrowful--and "The Disenchanted" stands as one of the most compelling and emotional evocations of generational disillusionment and fallen American stardom.

Budd Schulberg s classic story of the New York waterfront and the kid who coulda been a contender is best known in its memorable movie version with Marlon Brando. But here, adapted for the stage by Mr. Schulberg and Stan Silverman, it remains a moving and powerful drama. This play script for "On the Waterfront" has been used in theatres large and small, throughout the country, to great success. It offers amateur and professional groups an opportunity to re-create Mr. Schulberg s indelible characters and highly charged moments. Helpful stage suggestions are included, and the author introduces the script with a reminiscence that is both poignant and informative. As with all Plays for Performance books, this one is presented with production values uppermost in mind.

In the fall of 1959, Harper's Magazine published a special supplement on the state of writing and the American literary scene. The supplement was greeted with a broadside of commendation and a fusillade of cavil, and has since become recognized as the most useful brief survey of the contemporary state of the American writing arts and of their fellow travelers, the spoken word, the typescript word, the filmed and televised word, and the publishing memorandum. In this newly reissued volume in the Rutgers University Press Classics Imprint, Writing in America proves to be as stimulating as it was in 1960. Here, writers including Robert Brustein, Stanley Kunitz, and C.P. Snow examine the state of writing in American novels, films, and television candidly and critically. The result is a collection of essays that showcase a first-rate and highly entertaining piece of reporting on the American literary scene that resonate in 2017.

In the fall of 1959, Harper's Magazine published a special supplement on the state of writing and the American literary scene. The supplement was greeted with a broadside of commendation and a fusillade of cavil, and has since become recognized as the most useful brief survey of the contemporary state of the American writing arts and of their fellow travelers, the spoken word, the typescript word, the filmed and televised word, and the publishing memorandum. In this newly reissued volume in the Rutgers University Press Classics Imprint, Writing in America proves to be as stimulating as it was in 1960. Here, writers including Robert Brustein, Stanley Kunitz, and C.P. Snow examine the state of writing in American novels, films, and television candidly and critically. The result is a collection of essays that showcase a first-rate and highly entertaining piece of reporting on the American literary scene that resonate in 2017.

What Makes Sammy Run?

Everyone of us knows someone who runs. He is one of the symp-toms of our times—from the little man who shoves you out of the way on the street to the go-getter who shoves you out of a job in the office to the Fuehrer who shoves you out of the world. And all of us have stopped to wonder, at some time or another, what it is that makes these people tick. What makes them run?

This is the question Schulberg has asked himself, and the answer is the first novel written with the indignation that only a young writer with talent and ideals could concentrate into a manuscript. It is the story of Sammy Glick, the man with a positive genius for being a heel, who runs through New York’s East Side, through newspaper ranks and finally through Hollywood, leaving in his wake the wrecked careers of his associates; for this is his tragedy and his chief characteristic—his congenital incapacity for friendship.

An older and more experienced novelist might have tempered his story and, in so doing, destroyed one of its outstanding qualities. Compromise would mar the portrait of Sammy Glick. Schulberg has etched it in pure vitriol, and dissected his victim with a precision that is almost frightening.

When a fragment of this book appeared as a short story in a national magazine, Schulberg was surprised at the number of letters he received from people convinced they knew Sammy Glick’s real name. But speculation as to his real identity would be utterly fruitless, for Sammy is a composite picture of a loud and spectacular minority bitterly resented by the many decent and sincere artists who are trying honestly to realize the measureless potentialities of motion pictures. To this group belongs Schulberg himself, who has not only worked as a screen writer since his graduation from Dartmouth College in 1936, but has spent his life, literally, in the heart of the motion-picture colony. In the course of finding out what makes Sammy run (an operation in which the reader is spared none of the grue-some details) Schulberg has poured out everything he has felt about that place. The result is a book which the publishers not only believe to be the most honest ever written about Hollywood, but a penetrating study of one kind of twentieth-century success that is peculiar to no single race of people or walk of life.


From the Hardcover edition.