In Shaw's case, his 1948 novel The Young Lions put him on the literary map, with a later movie version starring Marlon Brando, Dean Martin and Montgomery Clift earning its share of award nominations. Shaw, who also wrote for radio, theater and film himself, continued to have success on the big and small screen, and while this and particularly Rich Man, Poor Man surely boosted his bank accounts, he did seem to lose some of his purely writerly reputation along the way. He produced some very well-crafted short stories, however, including "The Girls in Their Summer Dresses" and "The Eighty-Yard Run," the latter of which -- about the downward slide of a 1920s college football hero -- is excerpted here:
That was the high point, Darling thought, fifteen years ago, on an autumn afternoon, twenty years old and far from death, with the air coming easily into his lungs, and the deep feeling inside him that he could do anything, knock over anybody, outrun whatever had to be outrun...[h]e had practiced the wrong thing, perhaps. He hadn't practiced for 1929 and New York City and a girl who would turn into a woman.
Irwin Shaw died in 1984 in Switzerland. Unfortunately, the troubled marriage and heavy drinking of "The Eighty-Yard Run" were also reflected in his life beyond the typewriter, but if Shaw's boyhood dream was to be a successful writer, he surely managed that long football pass.
