Irwin Shaw (né Irwin Gilbert Shamforoff, February 27, 1913 - May 16, 1984) was a Jewish-American playwright, screen writer and author. Irwin Shamforoff was born in the South Bronx, New York City to Russian Jewish immigrants. Shortly after Irwin's birth, the Shamforoffs moved to Brooklyn, and their family name was changed to Shaw. He spent most of his youth in Brooklyn, where he graduated from Brooklyn College with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1934. During his time at the college, he wrote for a school newspaper.

Shaw began screenwriting in 1935 at the age of 21. He also wrote for several radio shows, including Dick Tracy, The Gumps and Studio One. In 1936, Shaw's first play, Bury the Dead, about a group of soldiers killed in a battle, was produced. During the 1940s, Shaw wrote for a number of films, including Talk of the Town (a comedy about civil liberties), The Commandos Strike at Dawn (based on a C.S. Forester story about commandos in occupied Norway) and Easy Living (about a football player unable to enter the game due to a medical condition).

Shaw enlisted in the U.S. Army and was a warrant officer during World War II. The Young Lions, Shaw's first novel, was published in 1948. Based on his experiences in Europe during the war, the novel was very successful and was adapted into a 1958 film. However, the film bore little resemblance to the book, which embittered Shaw.

Shaw's second novel, The Troubled Air, chronicling the rise of McCarthyism, was published in 1951. He was one of the ones who signed a petition asking the U.S. Supreme Court to review the John Howard Lawson and Dalton Trumbo convictions for contempt of Congress resulting from hearings by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Falsely accused of being a communist by the Red Channels publication, Shaw was placed on the Hollywood blacklist by the movie studio bosses. In 1951 he left the United States and went to Europe where he lived for 25 years, mostly in Paris and Switzerland. He later claimed that the blacklist "only glancingly bruised" his career. During the 1950s, he wrote several more screenplays, including Desire Under the Elms (based on Eugene O'Neill's play) and Fire Down Below (about a tramp boat in the Caribbean).

While living in Europe, Shaw wrote more bestselling books, notably Lucy Crown (1956), Two Weeks in Another Town (1960), Rich Man, Poor Man (1970) (for which he would later write a less successful sequel entitled Beggarman, Thief) and Evening in Byzantium (made into a 1978 TV movie). Rich Man, Poor Man was adapted into a highly successful miniseries in 1976.

During his lifetime, Irwin Shaw won a number of prestigious awards, including two O. Henry Awards, a National Institute of Arts and Letters grant and three Playboy Awards. He died in Davos, Switzerland.

External links

• Shaw's publisher page
• LitWeb: Irwin Shaw
• Review of Shaw's short stories
• 1989 audio interview of Michael Schnayerson, the biographer of Irwin Shaw, RealAudio
• The Paris Review Interview

American novelists | American dramatists and playwrights | American screenwriters | Hollywood blacklist | Jewish American writers | American World War II veterans | People from New York | 1913 births | 1984 deaths

Irwin Shaw | Irwin Shaw | Irwin Shaw | Irwin Shaw | Irwin Shaw