Schulberg has been compared to humorists Mark Twain and John O'Hara, satirist George Bernard Shaw, journalist turned novelist Ernest Hemingway. His writings are humorous, at times even satirical, often reportorial.

Schulberg's anecdotal tales of Hollywood even bring ripples of laughter in the same way as Twain's tales of his town and river do in the book Life on the Mississippi. Schulberg's humor is not aimed to hurt an individual, rather it touches the larger whole; sometimes it is tipped with a touch of sarcasm, somewhat more often satire — never overt anger as Twain's ultimately becomes in Letters to the Earth. Despite a strong social concern, Schulberg does not allow cynicism to wash over his humor.

Writing in the vein of the social novelists, Schulberg exposes the sores of a society, sores such as one might find in a Zola or a Steinbeck novel, in the...