Irvin Shou

Irwin Shaw was an American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright. Irwin Shaw became one of the few writers able to cast high literature in the deceptively simple form of entertaining fiction. Irwin Shaw’s novels not only consistently became bestsellers, were repeatedly reissued and adapted for the screen, but also entered the golden fund of twentieth-century literature.

The writer’s real name was Irwin Gilbert Shamforoff. He was born in the United States, in the South Bronx of New York, into a family of Jewish immigrants from Russia. Soon after Irwin’s birth, the family moved to Brooklyn and changed their surname to Shaw. The writer spent his childhood and youth in Brooklyn, where he graduated from Brooklyn College in 1934 with a bachelor’s degree. In his youth he was strongly influenced by the spiritual climate of the “Red Thirties”; he was fascinated by B. Brecht, F. Lorca, and E. Hemingway. After graduating from Brooklyn College in 1934, he earned a living writing radio serials for the popular shows “Andy Gump” and “Dick Tracy.” In 1936 the magazine Novy Mir published a play by the twenty-year-old American entitled Bury the Dead. This was Irwin Shaw’s debut. He became known in both the USA and the USSR at the same time, but it was only quite recently that this writer was truly discovered in our country. A year later, Bury the Dead was staged on Broadway. Shaw expresses his rejection of war through the voices of fallen soldiers who, rising from the dead, address the audience. Irwin Shaw published his first stories in The New Yorker and Esquire. The growing threat of fascism and the whole atmosphere of the prewar years, an era of open social antagonisms, depression, and anger, can be felt in the stories collected in Sailor Off the Bremen. In the 1940s Shaw wrote screenplays for several films. With the outbreak of World War II, the pacifist Shaw volunteered for the front; for several years he was a war correspondent. His wartime experience formed the basis of his best novel, The Young Lions, which enjoyed enormous success—it became a bestseller and was also highly praised by critics. The novel ranks among the best works about World War II. The Young Lions stands apart from other “war” novels because Shaw tried to make