Irwin Shaw is one of the very few writers of whom it may be said that they are a delight, rather than a duty, to read. His stuff may be momentous or it may be casual, but it gets going. There is always that sense of motion. A hundred years from now some dusty fellow will be attributing this style in writing to the influence of that brisk and highly dramatic technique of the movie cutter (the influence of the film in literature has already been noted, usually by people who were insufficiently dusty, who were scarcely initiated in the simple matter of fiction writing, and who knew nothing about the movies whatsoever). But I think Shaw, along with O'Hara, Fuchs, Weidman, Smith, Odets and Newhouse, is an exemplary of the time and the place, of a new shift of style into a pattern recognizable as New York-American, early twentieth century.
After a noisy and bum play, Shaw found a market for his best talents, which are in the field of the short story…. [He] has never published a story that I put aside before I finished it. Trivial sometimes, yes. Without a plot or a sharply driven point, often. But if his characters merely talk, or act to no avail, there is still that indefinable sense of imminence, the feeling that something is about to happen even if nothing does, like the setting for a summer afternoon of rain and lightning, when the electric storm retreats over the near hills or passes around. I am sick of writers whom we should "watch" or "expect fine things from," after they have grown up, that is. I will settle for anybody who can keep the book light in my hand as I read it, reading for pleasure. "Welcome to the City" is not Irwin Shaw's best work to date, and it probably is not his best work for the future. But I will settle for Irwin Shaw.
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