Shaw was born Irwin Gilbert Shamforoff in the South Bronx, New York City, to Jewishimmigrants from Nizhyn, Ukraine[2] His parents were Rose and Will. His younger brother, David Shaw, became a noted Hollywood producer and writer.[3] Shortly after Irwin's birth, the Shamforoffs moved to Brooklyn. Irwin changed his surname upon entering college. He spent most of his youth in Brooklyn, where he graduated from Brooklyn College with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1934.
He began screenwriting in 1935 at age 21. In 1939 he married actress and producer Marian Edwards, daughter of silent film actor Snitz Edwards.[4] The couple divorced in 1967, remarrying two years before Irwin's death in 1984.
During World War II, he was approached by William Wyler to join his film unit. Unable to be commissioned as an officer due to his age and 1-A draft status,[5] Shaw decided to enter the Regular Army. Later, the Army, noting his background, reassigned him to the Signal Corps with George Stevens' film unit.[6] He was one of four writers attached to Stevens' command, in which he became a warrant officer. After the war, he returned to his career as a writer.
In the 1930s, Shaw wrote scripts for several radio shows, including Dick Tracy, The Gumps and Studio One. He recaptured this period of his life in his short story "Main Currents of American Thought," about a hack radio writer grinding out one script after another while calculating the number of words equal to the rent money:
Furniture, and a hundred and thirty-seven dollars. His mother had always wanted a good dining-room table. She didn't have a maid, she said, so he ought to get her a dining room table. How many words for a dining-room table?
Shaw's first play, Bury the Dead (1936) was an expressionist drama about a group of soldiers killed in a battle who refuse to be buried. His play Quiet City, directed by Elia Kazan and with incidental music by Aaron Copland, closed after two Sunday performances.
During the 1940s, Shaw wrote for a number of films, including The 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 married Marian Edwards (daughter of well-known screen actor Snitz Edwards). They had one son, Adam Shaw, born in 1950, himself a writer of magazine articles and non-fiction.
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. Shaw was not happy with the film, feeling it soft-pedaled some of the serious issues from his book, but it did well at the box office.
In 1950 Shaw published Report on Israel, a journalistic book dealing with the situation in the state around the time of its founding with photographs by Robert Capa.[10]
Rich Man, Poor Man was adapted into a highly successful ABC television miniseries with six 2-hour episodes shown for February 1 to March 15, 1976. The series ranked third in the seasonal Nielsens and garnered twenty-three Emmy nominations. A further adaptation, which Shaw had very little to do with, Rich Man, Poor Man--Book II was aired from September 21, 1976, to March 8, 1977. This was not as successful as the first.[12][13] There was a third sequel Beggar Man, Thief in 1978, which belatedly included the Jordache's sister Gretchen who had been a prominent character in the original book.[1][14]
His novel The Top of the Hill (1979) was made into a TV movie about the Winter Olympics at Lake Placid in 1980, starring Wayne Rogers, Adrienne Barbeau, and Sonny Bono.
His last two novels were Bread Upon the Waters (1981), a realist novel dealing with the socioeconomic conditions of 20th century New York,[15] and Acceptable Losses (1982).
Short stories
Shaw was highly regarded as a short story author, contributing to Collier's, Esquire, The New Yorker, Playboy, The Saturday Evening Post, and other magazines; and 63 of his best stories were collected in Short Stories: Five Decades (Delacorte, 1978), reprinted in 2000 as a 784-page University of Chicago Press paperback. Among his noted short stories are: "Sailor Off The Bremen", "The Eighty-Yard Run", and "Tip On A Dead Jockey". Three of his stories ("The Girls in Their Summer Dresses", "The Monument", "The Man Who Married a French Wife") were dramatized for the PBS series Great Performances. Telecast on June 1, 1981. This production was released on DVD in 2002 by Kultur Video.
^Miller, Gabriel William Wyler: The Life and Films of Hollywood's Most Celebrated Director University Press of Kentucky, July 19, 2013
^Harris, Mark Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War Canongate Books, February 20, 2014
^"The Papers of Irwin Shaw". BROOKLYN COLLEGE ARCHIVES AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS. Archived from the original on October 22, 2015. Retrieved December 11, 2013.
^Raičević, Svetlana (1987). "Beleška o piscu" [Biographical note]. Hleb povrh vode [Bread Upon the Waters] (in Serbo-Croatian). Beogradski izdavačko-grafički zavod. pp. 521–525. ISBN86-13-00192-0.
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