| Name: |
Irwin Shaw |
| Birth Date: |
|
| Death Date: |
|
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 Thought" have become staples of American short-story collections. Two of his World War II stories were O. Henry Memorial Award winners--"Walking Wounded" received the 1944 first prize, and the next year "Gunner's Passage" received the second prize. In a career that spanned almost half a century, Shaw published over eighty short stories; and the consistently high quality and thematic diversity of his work became especially evident in 1978, when sixty-three of his best were published in his Short Stories: Five Decades. While his initial recognition came in the 1930s as a proletariat protest writer, his best short fiction is in the tradition of existential modernism. He utilized the Jamesian "scenic" method and the technique of indirect and minimalist narration perfected by Ernest Hemingway, who was briefly his mentor, to create his own distinct brand of modernist short fiction.
This is a free page. This page contains 151 words. This
biography contains 5,893 words (approx. 20 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Biography with our Irwin Shaw Access Pass.
