Some Faces in the Crowd

Book excerpt: Twenty gritty stories by the Academy Award–winning writer of On the Waterfront and A Face in the Crowd. Despite growing up among Hollywood’s most powerful producers and movie stars in the 1920s and ’30s, Budd Schulberg was always a populist at heart. In this collection of his best short fiction, Schulberg takes readers from the halls of privilege in Los Angeles to smoky dives and dockyard slums in New York. His eye for detail and nose for trouble render characters as vividly as a Weegee photograph. These stories also represent the great clash of people and ideas in mid-century America. The collection includes “The Arkansas Traveler,” the story Schulberg adapted into the influential, prescient film A Face in the Crowd starring Andy Griffith. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Budd Schulberg including rare images and never-before-seen documents from the author’s estate.