Irwin Shaw was born in 1913 in the Bronx and moved early in life to Brooklyn. He received a B.A. from Brooklyn College in 1934 and began his career as a scriptwriter for popular radio programs of the 1930s, before moving to Hollywood to write for the movies. Disillusioned with the film industry, Shaw returned to New York. His first piece of serious writing, an antiwar play entitled Bury the Dead, was produced on Broadway in 1936. His first collection of stories, Sailor off the Bremen and Other Stories (1939), earned him an immediate and lasting reputation as a writer of fiction. His first novel, The Young Lions, published in 1948, won high critical praise as one of the most important books to come out of World War II. The commercial success of the book and the movie adaptation brought Shaw financial independence and allowed him to devote the rest of his career to writing novels, among them The Troubled Air (1951), Lucy Crown (1956), Rich Man, Poor Man (1970), and Acceptable Losses (1982). His stories are collected in Short Stories: Five Decades (1978). He died in Davos, Switzerland in 1984.
Gilbert Sorrentino was born in Brooklyn in 1929. He has published over thirty volumes of fiction, poetry, and essays. For much of the 1950s and ’60s he published literary journals and magazines, and in 1965 he took a job at Grove Press where his first editing assignment was Alex Haley’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Sorrentino’s first novel, The Sky Changes, was published in 1966 and was soon followed by Steelwork, in which he draws upon memories of his Brooklyn childhood. He taught literature at Stanford University for many years, and rumor has it that he is currently living in Brooklyn.
Donald E. Westlake was born in Brooklyn, but didn’t stay long, moving to Manhattan, Yonkers, Albany, Binghamton, and Manhattan again, before returning to deepest Brooklyn, a.k.a., Canarsie. That was a two-year stay, followed by Manhattan, Queens, Manhattan, New Jersey (the dark years), more Manhattan, a year in London, Manhattan again, and finally Columbia County in upstate New York. What he was doing among all those moves was attending college (no degrees) and the Air Force (no medals), getting married more than once, raising children, and writing. He has published about forty-five novels, others under different names, along with movie scripts, notably The Grifters, for which he received an Academy Award nomination. Westlake has won four Edgar Awards from the Mystery Writers of America — for best novel, best short story, best screenplay, and Grand Master. In 2002 he received a lifetime achievement award from the Writers Guild of America, East, but kept on writing anyway.