A short life of the author
Budd Wilson Schulberg (27 March 1914 – 5 August 2009) was an American novelist and screenwriter who was born into Hollywood royalty, grew up on studio lots, and wrote the definitive fictional account of the movie industry’s rapacious energy. His first novel, What Makes Sammy Run? (1941), introduced one of the great characters in American fiction — Sammy Glick, the relentless, amoral, brilliantly resourceful hustler who rises from the ghetto to the head of a movie studio by lying, stealing, betraying, and manipulating everyone in his path. The novel is simultaneously a satire of Hollywood, a study of American ambition, and a meditation on what happens to a culture that rewards ruthlessness.
Life
Schulberg was born in New York City, the son of B.P. Schulberg, who was head of production at Paramount Pictures during the studio’s golden age. He grew up in Hollywood, attended the Hollywood schools where the children of studio executives mixed with the children of stars, and was a student at Dartmouth College when he began writing fiction. He graduated in 1936 and returned to Hollywood to work as a screenwriter.
His early career was shaped by two forces: the movie industry, which he knew from the inside, and leftist politics. He was a member of the Communist Party briefly in the late 1930s — an affiliation that would haunt him during the McCarthy era.
What Makes Sammy Run? (1941)
The novel’s genius is its protagonist. Sammy Glick — a copy boy at a New York newspaper who talks his way into screenwriting, steals other writers’ work, seduces and discards women with the efficiency of a corporate restructuring, and arrives at the top of the movie industry before he is thirty — is one of the great literary creations of the American century.
The novel is narrated by Al Manheim, a more talented but less ruthless writer who watches Sammy’s rise with a mixture of fascination, horror, and grudging admiration. Al’s voice — sardonic, morally engaged, unable to look away — gives the novel its emotional depth: the story is not merely about Sammy’s success but about Al’s attempt to understand what Sammy represents about America.
The Hollywood establishment despised the book. Louis B. Mayer reportedly tried to prevent its publication and warned Schulberg’s father that the novel would end the family’s career in the industry. The Communist Party also attacked the novel, objecting to its unsympathetic portrayal of a Jewish character (a criticism that Schulberg found absurd — Sammy’s Jewishness is incidental to his monstrousness).
On the Waterfront (1954)
Schulberg wrote the screenplay for Elia Kazan’s film about corruption in the longshoremen’s union — the film that produced Marlon Brando’s “I coulda been a contender” speech and won eight Academy Awards. The screenplay was based on Malcolm Johnson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism about corruption on the New York waterfront.
The film has been read as an allegory of Schulberg’s and Kazan’s decision to name names before the House Un-American Activities Committee — both men testified and identified former Communist associates. The controversy over their testimony has never fully resolved, and it shadowed both careers.
The Harder They Fall (1947) and The Disenchanted (1950)
The Harder They Fall is a novel about the corruption of professional boxing — the fixed fights, the exploited fighters, the gangsters who control the sport. The book was adapted into a film (1956) starring Humphrey Bogart in his final role.
The Disenchanted is a roman à clef about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s last years in Hollywood — based on Schulberg’s experience of working with Fitzgerald on a screenplay in 1939. The novel is a portrait of artistic talent destroyed by alcoholism and commercial pressure, and it is one of the best fictional treatments of Fitzgerald’s decline.
Collecting Schulberg
What Makes Sammy Run? (1941, Random House) in first edition with dust jacket brings $200–$600. The Harder They Fall (1947) brings $50–$150. The Disenchanted (1950) brings $30–$80. Signed copies are available but not particularly scarce.