This is the first overview of Schulberg's career 1937-2000 (his own autobiography, Moving Pictures, covers his life only to age 17). For more than six decades, Budd Wilson Schulberg has known success in virtually every category of American writing. Raised in the Hollywood of the 1920s as the privileged son of a pioneer studio mogul, Schulberg achieved fame as novelist, short story writer, playwright, Oscar-winning screenwriter and boxing historian.

He also became a central figure in the entertainment industry's political turmoil of the 1940s and 50s, fleeing first from the Communist Party's attempts to control his writing, then testifying as a cooperating witness before the House Committee on Un-American activities, and finally emerging as a leader of the nation's non-Communist Left. Schulberg chronicled these events in the country's leading newspapers and intellectual journals.

He has also known, and written about, many other American writers and their difficulties in maintaining or recapturing early success: Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Nathanael West, William Saroyan, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, John O'Hara, Irwin Shaw and many other distinguished novelists and playwrights who were doing studio work.