Some Faces in the Crowd: Short Stories

One of the most accomplished novelists and screenwriters of our time (What Makes Sammy Run?, On the Waterfront), Budd Schulberg is a master of the art of the short story, as he proved in his early collection Some Faces in the Crowd. The crowd is the American landscape: indelible characters drawn coast-to-coast from the teeming streets of New York to tables at Hollywood’s legendary nightclub, Ciro’s. In these sparkling stories, Schulberg brings us vivid, restless people haunted by abrupt failure in the wake of rapid success. In The Arkansas Traveler he gives us Larry Lonesome Rhodes’s down-home stories of Riddle, Arkansas, which later became the stuff of the celebrated movie A Face in the Crowd. Schulberg’s characters have to take the responsibility for what they do. They have to pay moral costs and face defeats. -New York Times. Packed with verisimilitude.