Irwin Shaw is one of the very few writers of whom it may be said that they are a delight, rather than a duty, to read. His stuff may be momentous or it may be casual, but it gets going. There is always that sense of motion. A hundred years from now some dusty fellow will be attributing this style in writing to the influence of that brisk and highly dramatic technique of the movie cutter (the influence of the film in literature has already been noted, usually by people who were insufficiently dusty, who were scarcely initiated in the simple matter of fiction writing, and who knew nothing about the movies whatsoever). But I think Shaw, along with O'Hara, Fuchs, Weidman, Smith, Odets and Newhouse, is an exemplary of the time and the place, of a new shift of style into a pattern recognizable as New York-American...