What Makes Sammy Run? (1941) - Budd Schulberg

Written by Budd Schulberg
Read by Chris Andrew Ciulla
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

· Length: 11 hrs and 37 mins
· Release date: 05-08-18
· Publisher: Tantor Audio

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.

Sammy Glick is your prototype for the American Anti-Hero. Well written story and narrated wonderfully.

This novel by Budd Schulberg was inspired by the life of his father, early Hollywood mogul B. P. Schulberg.

At this point, Shulberg’s postscript to the novel, written many years later was more of an eye opener than the novel itself. It pointed out that what was scandalous behavior back in the 1930s has become so commonplace today that the book won’t even raise an eyebrow. And it doesn’t. The listen isn’t boring, but it isn’t jaw dropping either. The Sammy Glick’s of today are far more sinister and evil than the Sammy of then. Schulberg’s Glick almost becomes laughable when compared to today’s thugs.

It became both a movie and a stage musical.