Irwin Shaw

At 71 years old, Irwin Shaw has this physical status:

Irwin Shaw (February 27, 1913 – May 16, 1984) was an American playwright, screenwriter, poet, and short-story author whose published works have sold more than 14 million copies.

He is best known for two of his books: The Young Lions (1948), about three soldiers in the aftermath of World War II, was turned into a film starring Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift, and Rich Man, Poor Man (1970), about two siblings' fate after World War II.

It was turned into a hit miniseries starring Peter Strauss, Nick Nolte, and Susan Blakely in 1976.

Personal life

Shaw was born in the South Bronx, New York City, to Jewish immigrants from Russia. Rose and Will's parents were both children. David Shaw, his younger brother, became a well-known Hollywood producer and writer. The Shamforoffs immigrated to Brooklyn just after Irwin's birth. When Irwin first enrolled in college, he changed his surname. He spent the majority of his youth in Brooklyn, where he graduated from Brooklyn College in 1934 with a Bachelor of Arts degree.

At the age of 21, he began screenwriting in 1935. Marian Edwards, the daughter of silent film actor Snitz Edwards, married him in 1939. The couple married in 1967, remarrying two years before Irwin's death in 1982.

During World War II, William Wyler invited him to join his film crew. Shaw decided to join the Regular Army after being refused to be commissioned as an officer due to his age and 1-A draft status. Later, the Army, noting his ances, took him to George Stevens' film unit. He was one of four writers attached to Stevens' administration, in which he became a warrant officer. He returned to writing after the war.

After being in Davos, Switzerland, at the age of 71, Shaw died of prostate cancer treatment.

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Career

Shaw wrote scripts for several radio shows, including Dick Tracy, The Gumps, and Studio One in the 1930s. In his short story "Main Currents of American Thought," about a hack radio writer churning out one script after another while calculating the number of words equal to the rent money, he recalled this period of his life.

Bury the Dead (1936), Shaw's first play, was an expressionist drama about a group of soldiers wounded in a war that refuses to be buried. After two Sunday performances, Elia Kazan's play Quiet City, starring incidental music by Aaron Copland, was sold.

Shaw wrote for a number of films during the 1940s, including The Talk of the Town (a comedy about civil rights), The Commandos Strike at Dawn (based on a C.S.). Forester's tale about commandos in occupied Norway) and Simple Living (about a football player who is unable to attend due to a medical condition). Shaw married Marian Edwards (daughter of well-known screen actor Snitz Edwards). Adam Shaw, their one son, was born in 1950 and became a writer of magazine papers and non-fiction.

Shaw spent the summer at the Pine Brook Country Club, located in the countryside of Nichols, Connecticut, which became the 1936 summer home of the Group Theatre (New York), and was accompanied by Elia Kazan, Harold Clurman, Harry Morgan, John Garfield, Frances Farmer, Clifford Odets, and Lee J. Cobb.

Shaw's first book, The Young Lions, was published in 1948. The novel was very popular and was turned into a 1958 film based on his experiences in Europe during the war. Shaw was dissatisfied with the film, and it soft-pedaled some of the book's more difficult topics, but the box office did well.

In 1951, Shaw's second book, The Troubled Air, chronicling McCarthyism's meteoric rise. He was one of those who signed a petition urging the Supreme Court to review John Howard Lawson and Dalton Trumbo's convictions for contempt of Congress, which arose from House Committee on Un-American Activities' hearings. Shaw was accused of being a communist by the Red Channels' publication, and the movie studio owners had taken him off the Hollywood blacklist. He left the United States and went to Europe in 1951, mainly in Paris and Switzerland. He later claimed that the blacklist had "only glancingly bruised" his career. Desire Under the Elms (based on Eugene O'Neill's play) and Fire Down Below (about a tramp boat in the Caribbean) were two more screenplays written in the 1950s.

Shaw wrote more bestselling books while living in Europe, including Lucy Crown (1956), Two Weeks in Another Town (1960), Rich Man, Thief (1970) and Evening in Byzantium (1978), which was turned into a 1978 TV film.

With six two-hour episodes broadcast from February 1 to March 15, 1976, Rich Man, Poor Man was turned into a huge ABC television miniseries. The series debuted third in the seasonal Nielsens and received twenty-three Emmy nominations. Rich Man, Poor Man-Book II, a further version of Shaw's Rich Man, Poor Man-Book II, appeared on televisions from September 21, 1976, to March 8, 1977. This was not as popular as the first. Beggar Man, Thief was a 1978 edition, which oddly included Gretchen, Jordache's sister, who had been a central figure in the original book.

In 1980, Wayne Rogers, Adrienne Barbeau, and Sonny Bono made their book The Top of the Hill (1979) into a television film about the Winter Olympics at Lake Placid, starring Wayne Rogers, Adrienne Barbeau, and Sonny Bono.

He wrote Bread Upon the Waters (1981) and Acceptable Losses (1982).

Shaw was well-known as a short story writer, contributing to Collier's, Esquire, The New Yorker, Playboy, The Saturday Evening Post, and other journals; and, 63 of his best stories were collected in Short Stories: Five Decades (Delacorte, 1978), a 784-page University of Chicago Press paperback first published in 2000. "Sailor Off The Bremen," "The Eighty-Yard Run," and "Tip On A Dead Jockey" are among his notable short stories. For the PBS series Great Performances, three of his stories ("The Girls in Their Summer Dresses," "The Monument," and "The Man Who Married a French Wife") were dramatized. On June 1, 1981, a telecast was shown on June 1, 1981. Kultur Video's 2002 film "Family" was released on DVD.

Shaw wrote a book about Israel in 1950, with photographs by Robert Capa called Report on Israel.

Shaw has received a number of awards over his lifetime, including two O. Henry Awards, a National Institute of Arts and Letters grant, and three Playboy Awards.

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