[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 ...

We shed our sicknesses in our books, D. H. Lawrence wrote, but there are novelists like Irwin Shaw who seem able only to restate their maladies in each successive work. This sad, sterile, absolutely immobile talent has a medical dossier that reads like this: immaturity; false (or Hollywood-engendered) vitality; melancholia; concern with popularity; arrest at the second or possibly third most superficial level of the Zeitgeist; an ear for talk but not speech; a vision of love that delineates its ape. Nothing...

[The plight of liberals] in a period whose chief contribution to politics is the smear, guilt by association, conviction without hearing and loyalty by threat is the general subject of ["The Troubled Air"]. Since the particular subject is the firing of five persons from a radio program because a fly-by-night magazine charges they are Communists or fellow travelers, it could hardly be more timely. The point it makes may not endure, but meanwhile it should interest anyone who gives a second thou...

New York City's Borough of Brooklyn has been for so long a subject of literary and vaudeville humor that it is pleasant to find Irwin Shaw defending it in several of the twenty stories which make up "Sailor off the Bremen." Unlike most native Brooklynites, who are nearly always ashamed to admit that they hail from the City of Churches, he is forthright in declaring his affection for his home town and the three million who live in it. Though the title story, a vigorous melodrama, is the ...

[In "Bread Upon the Waters," Irwin Shaw details] the burdens of limitless bounty, the temptations of accepting overwhelming generosity, the attempts to keep a family together when outside forces are threatening its preservation as a tightly knit unit. But there is much more here, and if we accept this novel as only a Santa Claus fantasy gone awry, we are doing its author a great disservice. Allen Strand is a curiously old-fashioned man adrift in a culture moving too swiftly for him, protected ...

Michael Storrs, the hero of Irwin Shaw's … novel, "The Top of the Hill," can't seem to adapt himself…. Despite the glib self-knowledge that permits him to best his wife in the game of psychoanalysis, he goes right on "jumping out of airplanes etcetera"—which to him means taking risks that make him feel more alive, and to [his wife] means that one day soon she may be married to a corpse. So what with his failing marriage and job as a management c...

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...

["Bury the Dead"] presents the finest image that has appeared in our theatre this year. A great theatre image is when there is discovered something seen and done in which the central idea is completely expressed, and is revealed without effort, as if creation had fully taken place already and were all exhibited. Not often in drama anywhere do we find so powerful an image as dominates the whole of "Bury the Dead." A myth is created, a veritable fable is established. When these six...

Irwin Shaw confronts the … problems of wealth and freedom, in a novel which represents a welcome return to form after the blustering machismo of The Top of the Hill. Bread Upon the Waters offers both a richly realised account of life in contemporary New York, and a real sense of engagement with moral theme. Allen Strand, its hero, is a middle-aged history teacher whose strenuous work in a tough urban secondary school is relieved by an idyllically happy home life. One evening, as the family sits down ...

[In "The Troubled Air", his] brisk, journalistic second novel, Irwin Shaw describes the plight of a politically liberal radio director who finds himself embroiled in a purge of Communists and fellow-travelers touched off by a super-patriotic magazine. With impressive circumstantiality he demonstrates what a great many people have been suspecting for some time: that radicalism is no longer fashionable on the air waves and can, as a matter of fact, spin careers downward to economic ruin and suic...

Being dramatists first and reformers second, Peter Viertel and Irwin Shaw have written a rattling good play with a meaning. It is "The Survivors."… The authors are demonstrating the futility of killing. But instead of presenting it as a political argument, they have embodied it in a rousing gun drama laid in Missouri after the Civil War…. ["The Survivors" begins to get down to the core of its thesis when] Steve, hesitating between principle and tradition, has to lis...

Irwin Shaw has written a semi-documentary melodrama in "The Assassin." His [play] … sticks to facts with reasonable authority as it celebrates the killing of the wily French collaborationist Admiral Darlan, in 1942. Unfortunately, it takes an unconscionable time getting to the pay-off, and winds up with no more than a tiny distillation of dramatic meaning and feeling. Occasionally the writing and the acting make a scene flare up rather triumphantly. This does not keep the cadences of th...

Melvin Peabody is an awesome, proud, defiant, defensive, embattled, embittered, eloquent and furious figure. Somebody should write a play about him. And this is just what Irwin Shaw has failed to do in ["Children From Their Games"]…. He has fashioned a whale of a dramatic portrait, on the assumption that it constitutes a play.

"The Assassin" is not a good play. It is too often wordy, too often high-sounding without substance, it has too many waits and too little dramatic drive. The melodramatic phase of the murder runs into a sentimental love affair and that into a discussion of philosophy—and none of them fare well from the union…. On the political side, Mr. Shaw is saying that men of honesty, regardless of faith, eventually will reach the common good; that mistakes, such as the "Admiral,...

The Young Lions was one of the few genuinely praiseworthy "big" novels to come out of the Second World War. Unfortunately for Shaw it landed him with the legend (one he shares with his contemporary Norman Mailer with whom he was often compared) that he wrote his best novel first. His latest is going to do nothing to dispel that impression. Bread Upon the Waters concerns the effects of misdirected philanthropy on a middle-class New York family—the Strands….