Schulberg is concerned with rendering the truth of life. His journalistic approach to writing makes his fiction and nonfiction almost indistinguishable; a disclaimer before all his fiction might read: "only the names of the characters are changed to protect the innocent." But his writing is not of innocence; it is of experience. He details the stories of success and failure, the stories of one human's inhumanity to another, the stories of greed and the role it plays in promoting human misery. Those are the subjects of all his writing; fictional or nonfictional characters round out those concerns into the drama of human existence. However, despite the tough and hard world Schulberg often portrays in brutally honest terms, his tales are not mired in doom or dreariness (regardless of what some critics have said). In work after work, Schulberg is able to capture a buoyancy of the...