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Original Title:	What Makes Sammy Run?
ISBN:	0375508317 (ISBN13: 9780375508318)
Edition Language:	English
Characters:	Sammy Glick

What Makes Sammy Run? Hardcover | Pages: 320 pages

Details Containing Books What Makes Sammy Run?

Title	:	What Makes Sammy Run?
Author	:	Budd Schulberg
Book Format	:	Hardcover
Book Edition	:	Anniversary Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 320 pages
Published	:	May 7th 2002 by Random House (first published 1941)
Categories	:	Fiction. Classics. Novels. Culture. Film

Chronicle Supposing Books What Makes Sammy Run?

What Makes Sammy Run?

Everyone of us knows someone who runs. He is one of the symp-toms of our times—from the little man who shoves you out of the way on the street to the go-getter who shoves you out of a job in the office to the Fuehrer who shoves you out of the world. And all of us have stopped to wonder, at some time or another, what it is that makes these people tick. What makes them run?

This is the question Schulberg has asked himself, and the answer is the first novel written with the indignation that only a young writer with talent and ideals could concentrate into a manuscript. It is the story of Sammy Glick, the man with a positive genius for being a heel, who runs through New York’s East Side, through newspaper ranks and finally through Hollywood, leaving in his wake the wrecked careers of his associates; for this is his tragedy and his chief characteristic—his congenital incapacity for friendship.

An older and more experienced novelist might have tempered his story and, in so doing, destroyed one of its outstanding qualities. Compromise would mar the portrait of Sammy Glick. Schulberg has etched it in pure vitriol, and dissected his victim with a precision that is almost frightening.

When a fragment of this book appeared as a short story in a national magazine, Schulberg was surprised at the number of letters he received from people convinced they knew Sammy Glick’s real name. But speculation as to his real identity would be utterly fruitless, for Sammy is a composite picture of a loud and spectacular minority bitterly resented by the many decent and sincere artists who are trying honestly to realize the measureless potentialities of motion pictures. To this group belongs Schulberg himself, who has not only worked as a screen writer since his graduation from Dartmouth College in 1936, but has spent his life, literally, in the heart of the motion-picture colony. In the course of finding out what makes Sammy run (an operation in which the reader is spared none of the grue-some details) Schulberg has poured out everything he has felt about that place. The result is a book which the publishers not only believe to be the most honest ever written about Hollywood, but a penetrating study of one kind of twentieth-century success that is peculiar to no single race of people or walk of life.

Rating Containing Books What Makes Sammy Run?

Ratings: 4.08 From 1984 Users | 201 Reviews

Rate Containing Books What Makes Sammy Run?

A masterpiece. For On the Waterfront alone, Schulberg deserves to be considered one of the great American writers of the C20th. But What Makes Sammy Run? confirms his position. A savage and witty attack on an entire political / social philosophy (or rather a non-philosophy), the book charts the rise and rise of Sammy Glick from the gutter of New York's East Side to Beverly Hills. The individualism, the greed: the heartlessness at the heart of the American dream.

Al Manaheim is one of my favorite characters in fiction. I was bound to like this book since it has many parallels to The Great Gatsby, although its subject, Sammy Glick, is romanticized much less than Jay Gatsby. In many ways I feel this is an essential modern tale that all other modern stories have sprung from, but that is probably hyperbole. I love this book though.

What Makes Sammy Run tells the story of Sammy Glick, a man with boundless ambition and no morals to stand in his way. It is told from the point of view of Al Manheim, who watches Sammy's meteoric rise with anger, jealousy and awe. It has come to be one of the classic "Hollywood Novels" portraying Hollywood at its worst and most truthful, and as someone who works and lives in Hollywood, a lot of what Schulberg was trying to convey still remains true to this day. The book got a lot of criticism

"A grand book, utterly fearless and with a great deal of beauty side by side with the most bitter satire." Right on, F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Sammy is a classic. Schulberg's characterization totally nails a personality type that all of us know. Sammy isn't unique to show business, but because show business rewards Sammy-type behavior more than most walks of life, we have a lot more of them in show business than most people see in regular everyday life. The only thing that Schulberg got wrong is that this personality type is not something that can only arise in places like the tenements of New York's old time Lower East Side. I have

Plans to film What Makes Sammy Run? have been bandied around for decades, but the movie has already been made more or less via another Budd Schulberg story, A Face In The Crowd, i.e. boy-meets-girl as casualties of an arrogant, greedy media climbing monster. Anyone who has enjoyed films like The Player, The Bad And The Beautiful or Barton Fink will have a great time reading this, and Schulberg never runs out of great dialogue.