Budd Schulberg (Budd Wilson Schulberg) Biography

American novelist and screenwriter, born in New York City, educated at Dartmouth College. The son of a Hollywood screenwriter and producer, Schulberg has always been intimately associated with the film industry, largely through the commercial success of his first novel, What Makes Sammy Run (1941), a frenzied account of how its hero, Sammy Glick, rises from an inauspicious beginning on New York's Lower East Side to a position of power and influence in Hollywood. During his years as a screenwriter in Hollywood between 1936 and 1939, he met F. Scott Fitzgerald, about whom he was to write an important biographical essay, ‘Old Scott: The Myth, the Masque, the Man’, first published in Esquire in 1961 and reprinted in The Four Seasons of Success (1972). Fitzgerald's last years inspired Schulberg's portrait of the suffering writer in his third novel, The Disenchanted (1950). He achieved recognition from the world of film for his screenplay for Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront (1954); a novel, The Waterfront, followed in 1955. The Harder They Fall (1947), his second novel, is set in the world of boxing and presents an analysis of criminal entrepreneurship. Schulberg has been active in the promotion of creative writing programmes, notably in his founding of the Douglass House Watts Writers' Workshop in Los Angeles shortly after the 1965 Watts riots, and in his involvement with the New England Theatre Conference and the Frederick Douglass Creative Arts Center in New York City. His more recent works include Love, Action, Laughter and Other Sad Tales (1990) and Sparring with Hemingway (1995).