Irwin Shaw is one of the most frequently anthologized twentieth-century American short-story writers. Over the years, such Shaw stories as "The Girls in Their Summer Dresses", "The Eighty-Yard Run", "Act of Faith", and "Main Currents of American...

Irwin Shaw was born in New York City, the son of William Shaw, a salesman of hat trimmings, and Rose Tompkins Shaw. When he was very young the family moved to the Sheepshead Bay section of Brooklyn, where he attended local schools and developed a...

Within the past year, three of the most famous authors to emerge after World War II have died: Norman Mailer, Kurt Vonnegut and William Styron. Their deaths all resulted in front-page stories, lengthy appreciations and ongoing discussions about their place in American letters.No writer was...

Rassim al-JumailiBAGHDAD (AP) — Rassim al-Jumaili, a veteran Iraqi comedian who left his homeland for Syria after the U.S. invasion and played a sarcastic dictator in his final role earlier this year, died Saturday, a colleague said. He was 69.Al-Jumaili died in neighboring Syria, where...

“Injustice rules,” cries the Random House flier. No, they’re not vexed by the spreading loom of terror, the unhappy history of Kashmir or even the legal process in California (all of which figure in Shalimar the Clown). The publisher’s alarm is more local: “The Swedes...

“Injustice rules,” cries the Random House flier. No, they’re not vexed by the spreading loom of terror, the unhappy history of Kashmir or even the legal process in California (all of which figure in Shalimar the Clown). The publisher’s alarm is more local: “The Swedes...

[With] 10 of his 11 novels having appeared on the best-seller list, and with his new novel, Bread Upon the Waters, headed there in the fall …, Irwin Shaw has come to represent big bucks and bad books. The unexamined consensus among the quality controllers of American literature is that Shaw was an exceptionally gifted short-story writer who published a promising first novel and then betrayed his promise. According to the official line, with his laconically pointed dialogue, his controlled tough-guy l...

["Bury the Dead"] is based on a conceit of originality and power. Six men just laid in their new dug graves by a weary detachment of fellow-soldiers rise slowly to their feet and with quiet persistence refuse to submit to the final indignity—dirt on their faces. They are dead all right. There is no doubt about that. But they won't be buried and they won't lie still no matter how anxious the living may be to have them covered, and forgotten, and quiet at last. The men order...

Irwin Shaw is a moral writer who conceives moral problems simply, feels them deeply, and dramatizes them with an often terrifying historical relevance. As a result, once met, his stories stay in the mind…. [The stories collected in "Act of Faith and Other Stories"] were written during the war about the war, but they cannot be taken retrospectively as an account of what has been. One finds, re-reading them in a period of unreal, unstable peace, that they gain in meaning, in the power to ...