Short Stories

Irwin Shaw was a star of the New Yorker’s fiction pages in the 1930s and ’40s. His prose helped shape the landscape of post-war fiction, and his work drew from a remarkable life that spanned from American football fields to European battlefields, Broadway to Hollywood, Depression-era saloons to the McCarthy hearings. Among these sixty-three stories are iconic works such as “The Eighty-Yard Run,” a tale of an American dream crippled on Black Monday, and “Main Currents in American Thought,” in which a hack radio copywriter is tormented by the glitz of show business. Through the decades, Shaw’s writing —as demonstrated in these pages—maintains the  clear-eyed  moral purpose, rich in wit and startling insight, of a tough kid with a philosopher’s soul.