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What Makes Sammy Run?

3.99 of 5 stars 3.99 · rating details · 594 ratings · 80 reviews

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....more 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.(less)

Hardcover, 320 pages

Published May 7th 2002 by Random House (first published 1941)

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Feb 17, 2013 Richard rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Book Circle Reads 82

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Book Description: Everyone of us knows someone who runs. He is one of the symptoms 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...more Book Circle Reads 82

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Book Description: Everyone of us knows someone who runs. He is one of the symptoms 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.

My Review: Budd Schulberg got a lot of grief for writing this "anti-Semitic" shriek of outrage at the backstabbing, grasping, greedy, hollow culture of Hollywood. Well, how else could he tell the story? The moguls of the time were almost all Jewish, and they weren't nice little yeshiva boys but street toughs with chips on their shoulders hell bent for leather to make it to the top.

Today it is a lot less true of Hollywood's power elite. Not the behavior, the Jewishness. The behavior is intact! Of this I assure you from personal experience. And people of both genders and all religious and cultural affiliations enact it there. Awful place. As one would expect from any place where there is that much money floating around. *Breathtaking* amounts of money. The greed of these people is utterly beyond the comprehension of mere mortals. "Enough" is what you say to the chauffeur you're firing who complains it's unjust.

Reading this book was a bitter and painful reliving of my education in how "no good deed goes unpunished" and I will never re-read it for that reason. But dayum! What a glorious excoriation of the moral midgets who make our movies, TV shows, and music! I am in *awe* that Schulberg got away with writing it and stayed in Hollywood! Steven Spielberg, that maker of iconically positive movies, said the book should never be made into a movie because it's too anti-movie-biz.

Guess what: It never has been. Even Ben Stiller, who wanted to star and direct, couldn't get it done when he was at his peak of fame and power.

Shows you just how true it was, is, and will remain. *shudder*(less)

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Dec 20, 2008 Nicholas rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: lifestyle

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. This is what you could become. Running forever to reach what? Whatever. The quotes'll capture it.

Quotes:

"I can still see Sammy racing between the desks, his tie flying wild-eyed, desperate."

"The world was a race to Sammy. He was running against time."

"Ability to absorb insults and embarrassment like a sponge was turning out to be one of his greatest accomplishments."

"That was because I didn't know as much about Sammy Glick then as I do now, or about the world either. It was funny as time went on...more

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Dec 17, 2010 Andy rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: hollywoodbabylon

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.

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Dec 29, 2008 Mark rated it 5 of 5 stars

What a read. Budd Schulberg wrote the screenplay for A Face in the Crowd, which you may not have seen but absolutely should and for On the Waterfront, which I have to imagine you have seen and if not, shame shame.

This pace of the prose moves every bit as fast as the hellbent for success Sammy Glick does from page one to an ending that I forgave for being slightly more preachy than poetic. Schulberg could not have made what the Gotham Writers' Workshop Writing Fiction instructional book refers to...more

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Mar 12, 2013 John rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: popular-fiction

Great, cynical narrative of Hollywood's Golden Age, focusing on the ruthless ambition of Sammy Glick, who rises from newspaper copy boy to Hollywood producer through a combination of other people's talent and his own lack of scruples. It occurs to me that it should be read alongside the two other great Hollywood novels of its moment, Day of the Locust and the unfinished The Last Tycoon (the latter of which I'll reread next). This is especially because Schulberg (himself the son of a Hollywood pr...more

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Jan 13, 2013 Michelle rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is a great little book. And very indicative of the type of "me first" thinking that has come to infect and identify American culture as we have come to know it of late.

Sammy Glick is the fore-runner to all of the Wall Street bankers of today - the oil industry execs - all of the "contestants" on the reality shows who think that they deserve the prize more than anyone else (and they'll pay people to vote for them, bribe people, etc) - of the fashion industry wannabes who stab people in the...more

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Aug 25, 2012 Tara rated it 4 of 5 stars

If Schulberg had written a sequel, it would have been the story of Citizen Kane, or that's how I think of this book and the character Sammy. Then again, when reading about the author's father, BP Schulberg and his short-lived partnership with Mayer (of MGM), you'd think that Mayer inspired the character of Sammy.. but of course, Sammy is a composite character.

If you're a film buff, you'll probably relish this book even more. There was one section where Schulberg compared the story's scenes to mo...more

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Nov 21, 2011 Gaston marked it as to-read

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 y...more 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.

From the Hardcover edition.
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Jan 27, 2011 Joe rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Schulberg, whose father B.P. Schulberg was a top executive at Paramount Pictures, had a good deal of guts to unleash this book when he did (it was published in 1941when the Hollywood studio system was in full flower). The immigrant-Jew-becomes-mogul rags to riches story that was once so typical of the movie industry bigwig—Mayer, Goldwyn and Zukor, among others, all came from that mold—is used by Schulberg to tell the story of Sammy Glick, formerly Samuel Glickstein, who drops one identity to pu...more

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Jul 25, 2011 Kane Faucher rated it 4 of 5 stars

A quintessential case study of pathological narcissism. The obsession of the protagonist, Al Manheim, with the exuberant, merciless ambition of Sammy Glick(Stein) is an attempt to draw an etiological set of reasons and conditions for what makes people like Sammy possible. It should be noted that this variety of aggrandized secondary narcissism and an inability to form proper object relations was, at the time of the book's writing (1941), becoming a systemic feature of corporate culture and the r...more

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Nov 10, 2009 Emily rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2002

Well, one of them I read beforehand, and it's been a while now, I will just write about it briefly. B.R. Myers recommended What Makes Sammy Run? (1941) by Budd Schulberg (who wrote the screenplay for On the Waterfront) so I decided to give it a try. The first five pages are among the most grabbing I have ever read -- funny, pithy, intriguing. It opens:

The first time I saw him he couldn't have been much more than sixteen years old, a little ferret of a kid, sharp and quick. Sammy Glick. Used to...more

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Feb 05, 2013 Paul Lyons rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. Excellent work of true-to-life fiction by first-time novelist Bud Schulberg. Schulberg knew his stuff, having grown up in Hollywood, with his father running Paramount Pictures, and having worked for the likes of David O. Selznick, Louis B. Mayer and Samuel Goldwyn.

Schulberg's iconic, scheming, tenacious, ambitious and morally reprehensible "Sammy Glick" is only a fictional character in theory. In truth Sammy Glick is as real as you and I in 2013, just as he was real in 1941, when "What Makes Sam...more Excellent work of true-to-life fiction by first-time novelist Bud Schulberg. Schulberg knew his stuff, having grown up in Hollywood, with his father running Paramount Pictures, and having worked for the likes of David O. Selznick, Louis B. Mayer and Samuel Goldwyn.

Schulberg's iconic, scheming, tenacious, ambitious and morally reprehensible "Sammy Glick" is only a fictional character in theory. In truth Sammy Glick is as real as you and I in 2013, just as he was real in 1941, when "What Makes Sammy Run?" was first published. No wonder Hollywood hated Schulberg after the novel was published...since the book exposes a world of selfish, arrogant, amoral and shamefully naked ambition...epitomized by Sammy Glick, an uneducated con artist with enough street smarts and ingenuity to get ahead in the entertainment world by tricking the people above him, and manipulating the people below him...leaving plenty of casualties along the way. Of course Hollywood hated Schulberg...as he was the one who called them out...and exposed their dirty undergarments: corruption, laziness, drunkenness, stubbornness, placated egos and solicitous lost souls planting story after story in the papers in order to booth their oh-so-important precious careers.

Yet what the critics and naysayers failed to understand is that Budd Schulberg, whether he would've admitted it or not, paints a strangely sympathetic portrait of this ruthlessly ambitious Mr. Glick. Schulberg has the reader look at Glick through the eyes of his morally sound "best friend" Al Manheim...giving us a first-person narrative as opposed to a straight, objective story. No, Schulberg's story is very SUBJECTIVE...which not only adds to the book's strength (and overall structure)...yet also provides for a fuller portrait of Sammy Glick than we would have gotten on our own. Manheim is our storyteller, our tour guide into the cons that Glick orchestrates with a master's precision...yet he is also acts as the book's Greek Chorus...the conscious of the tale...judging Sammy's dirty deeds without mincing words. Conversely, the Manheim goes on about Sammy Glick, the more you like him..."him" being Sammy Glick...NOT Manheim. In fact, Glick's consistent yearning for Manheim's trust and friendship (which Manheim seems to reject over and over again), comes off better than Manheim's obsession with "What Makes Sammy Run?"

Perhaps it was the humanist inside Budd Schulberg that forced him to paint Sammy Glick as a thoughtless, back-stabbing heel...yet NEVER as a villain. I repeat...NEVER as a villain. The fact is, I admired Sammy Glick in a similar way that Al Manheim did...perhaps even more so. Like Manheim, I frowned at the way Sammy abandoned this girl or that girl, took advantage of weaker men, and disrespected his father, and shunned his own mother and brother. Yet unlike Manheim, I did end up feeling sorry for Sammy Glick...sure he burned a lot of bridges on his way to the top...yet I still found myself rooting for him...and was saddened to hear that his reckless attempt at combining love with his thirst for power had failed miserably. Somehow Glick had to make it to the big time before he could find himself falling in love, and settling down...yet by then it was too late...too much damage had been done.

I loved Schulberg's writing...so casual and easy. His characterizations were so spot on...I could see each and every person in the book in the three hundred and sixty degrees. Plus, as I mentioned earlier, his use of first-person narrative was an excellent choice for this type of story. WHAT MAKES SAMMY RUN? is a book that still resonates today...seventy plus years since its first publication. Even if you don't care, nor relate to all things Hollywood...I would still recommend WHAT MAKES SAMMY RUN? as an insightful, humane look at fascinating part of American culture...and history.

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Feb 13, 2011 Joe rated it 5 of 5 stars

What makes Sammy Run is one of those novels that would be enjoyable read in one sitting. Okay, it took me a weekend, but that gives an idea of how grippingly good the tale is. There are good novels, and there are good stories which happen to be novels. This is the latter. I felt like sitting around the campfire, or settling into a seat at the movie theater. I was reading, sure, but I was telling myself an entertaining story about am ambitious Jewish youth from New York City who grabs Hollywood b...more

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Jan 28, 2012 Joshua rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: read-in-2012

I've meant to read Budd Schulberg's classic tale of Hollywood ambition for a long, long time. I can finally cross this one off my list thanks to a book on CD and the long commute I currently have at my new job. There's going to be a lot of books on CD coming my way to help me pass the time in the challenging Los Angeles traffic! WHAT MAKES SAMMY RUN? is the darkly-tinged Horatio Alger-esque tale of a nobody newspaper kid who begins to climb the ladder based on sheer guts, audacity, good fortune...more

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Feb 16, 2009 Max rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2009

Schulberg hits on something really archetypal here. He chronicles the rise of fictional film mogul who's part C. F. Kane and part Howard Hughes, from the perspective of a narrator who's part Salieri and part Nick Carraway. And it's pretty amazing, actually. On one level, it's a sharp dissection of a 40s insider Hollywood: a takedown of what was wrong with the studio system. But then it becomes more: a portrait of Jewish angst and hardship at the turn of the century. But really, it's an absorbing...more

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Oct 14, 2009 Tony Gleeson rated it 4 of 5 stars

It is difficult to believe that I've read this book nearly SEVENTY years after it was originally written! Schulberg's cynical and satirical novel still holds its bite and probably still relates to some extent to Hollywood and more generally to the worst side of human nature. Included in this edition are Schulberg's late-1980s reflections upon the uproar his work caused: it was alleged, among other things, that it besmirched the filmmaking industry and cast a bad light on Jewish Americans. Schulb...more

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Aug 15, 2008 Andrei Alupului rated it 4 of 5 stars

"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.

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Dec 30, 2010 Kathy Kushinsky rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: book-club, fiction-and-literature

You don't need to be a hollywood insider to enjoy this book. As I read about Sammy, who is focused on his next big opportunity, his next angle to get ahead, I could think of people at work, and in my personal life, that were Sammys, but just in other fields.

I often think about what makes different people tick - what causes them to singularly pursue a cause, a purpose, a field, or idea. This book focused on someone who desparately want to climb the Hollywood ladder no matter what the cost to othe...more

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Mar 05, 2009 Regina Clarkinia rated it 5 of 5 stars

i read this in high school and was fully engaged with the bastardness of this sammy. i want to read it again, it's sizzling in my mind.

from what i remember it's about a man who wants to become a hollywood big wig and does so using underhanded methods.

budd schulberg has such a classic american movies writing style (he wrote on the waterfront among gazillions of other books and movies). which (classic american) to me means big stories almost mythic, dealing with greed, fate, survival, alliances....more

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Oct 27, 2011 Leslie rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2011, 20th-century-fiction

The world is full of Sammy Glicks, amoral schemers desperate to grab as much as they can from the world and contemptuous of everyone they stop on for not being as ruthless as they are, who think goodness is weakness and poverty is the only crime. Today they run corporations and investment firms and the economy like a giant con job and give themselves big bonuses and fund conservative political parties so they can continue to rake in the proceeds unimpeded. And believe that anyone who criticises...more

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Aug 08, 2010 Charlaralotte rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: read-in-2010

I last read this book when I was around twelve. Think it went straight over my head.

Reading it now was a revelation. Especially after putting in my time in LA. All those moments when my friends and I would discuss why this or that person was such an asshole and yet making it to the top so fast... So great to read a book exploring the "how come" question.

Loved this line in Schulberg's updated forward: "How do we slow down the whole culture he [Sammy:] threatens to run away with and that threatens...more

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Nov 29, 2011 Peter rated it 5 of 5 stars

Budd Schulberg's What Makes Sammy Run? is a devastating portrait of ambition and success, set against the glimmering backdrop of 1930s Hollywood. Sammy Glick is a screenwriter and then producer who has no artistic talent whatsoever, and yet becomes a great success due to both his own relentless, remorseless drive and the town's warped values. Though he has no artistic talent, he wantonly steals from and exploits those who do, and turns their creative work into his own personal success through hi...more Budd Schulberg's What Makes Sammy Run? is a devastating portrait of ambition and success, set against the glimmering backdrop of 1930s Hollywood. Sammy Glick is a screenwriter and then producer who has no artistic talent whatsoever, and yet becomes a great success due to both his own relentless, remorseless drive and the town's warped values. Though he has no artistic talent, he wantonly steals from and exploits those who do, and turns their creative work into his own personal success through his greatest strength - that of self-promotion. He tirelessly sells himself, hogging the spotlight wherever he goes, taking full credit when he deserves none.

And yet, Hollywood rewards his bad behavior (which also includes a complete lack of conscience) and by the end of the novel, having stomped on everyone in his path on his way up the ladder, he has reached the pinnacle of success - he is production head of a major studio, is married to the gorgeous daughter of the multimillionaire financier who backs the studio, and owns a vast estate in Bel Air. He has everything, for the moment at least.

Sammy is an infuriating character, and as act after appalling act piled up, I found myself hungering for his ultimate comeuppance, the karmic retribution he so fully deserved. Which made me smile when I read the narrator thinking along the same lines, on the second-to-last page:

I thought how, unconsciously, I had been waiting for justice to suddenly rise up and smite him in all its vengeance, secretly hoping to be around when Sammy got what was coming to him; only I had expected something conclusive and fatal and now I realized that what was coming to him was not a sudden pay-off but a process...

As the novel ends, Sammy is on top, a blustery and superficial fake in a town that celebrates and rewards bluster, superficiality and fakery. But his retribution - and there will be retribution - won't be immediate. Instead, Hollywood will slowly tire of him as he ages and becomes overly familiar, and he will gradually be nudged aside for someone fresh and new, and he will find himself working his way, quite unwillingly, back down the career ladder - working with steadily smaller budgets, middling scripts and then B and C actors until one day he will likely be without any work at all. The same qualities which fueled his Hollywood success will ensure his downfall. But Schulberg neatly leaves Sammy's downfall offscreen, as it were, showing the protagonist on top but with the seeds of his eventual demise already sown.

What Makes Sammy Run? is a terrific, entertaining and thought-provoking read, one which I highly recommend.
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Oct 17, 2012 Raffi rated it 5 of 5 stars

Seeing that this novel is probably most comparable to the classic 1939 novel The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West as a Hollywood Novel, my opinion is that it--Sammy--is better than Locust. Schulberg provides a much more detailed and particular account of the goings-on of the actual film industry--how the grimy, greedy machinery of the individuals in that industry perpetuates its success--whereas West's novel seeks to tell a more universal tale, less concerned with the movie industry per se, m...more

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Apr 17, 2013 Bonnie Nordling rated it 5 of 5 stars

Written in 1941 but just as true today, more than 70 years later - is that a testament to the author or to our society? Either way, a brilliant read. Having spent close to 9 years in Hollywood, I have met quite a few Sammy's in real life. But whether you live here or you don't, there's no doubt you know someone who runs. The writing matches the pace at which Sammy glides through life, making it effortless to follow and gripping in its hold.

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Aug 12, 2010 Laura rated it 5 of 5 stars

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.

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Mar 22, 2009 Terry rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction

Ohhhhh dear. I am hating this book!!! I can't believe it. The writing is so... old fashioned. The dialogue is...awful. The female characters are ridiculous, which says more about Schulberg than it does about the female characters. And the narrator is so stupid and weak it makes me want to punch him; he's so awful I'm actually ROOTING for Sammy. The thing is, Schulberg's Moving Pictures is one of my favorite books. Please, read that, not this.

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Mar 20, 2010 Sara rated it 3 of 5 stars

someone gave me a copy of this book years earlier and when i finally got around to reading it the thing was mangled and falling apart. a strange time in my life, spring of 2003. I would walk large loops from the mission out to the water in either direction while reading this book, each page torn and thrown down on the ground, a trail of the story following behind me.

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Sep 11, 2012 Andrew rated it 5 of 5 stars

Loved it--amazing how a book written over fifty years ago still resonates today. Especially loved Schulberg's afterword, in which he traced Sammy through time. The character was despised as an overly ambitious, immoral climber in the 40s-60s but, by 1989 (when his afterword was written), Sammy was a character to be admired and emulated.

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May 20, 2011 Colin Heber-Percy rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: american-classics

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.

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Jun 07, 2012 Gobasso rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

We've all met someone like Sammy. Ruthless and unscrupulous, Sammy takes over Hollywood. Does he get what he wants in the end? What makes him crave power and money? I thought the writing style confusing at times requiring a four instead of a five, but this book belongs with "The Great Gatsby" as a classic American story.

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About Budd Schulberg

Budd Schulberg (1914–2009) was a screenwriter, novelist, and journalist who is best remembered for the classic novels What Makes Sammy Run?, The Harder They Fall, and the story On the Waterfront, which he adapted as a novel, play, and an Academy Award–winning film script. Born in New York City, Schulberg grew up in Hollywood, where his father, B. P. Schulberg, was head of production at Paramount,...more

More about Budd Schulberg...

Books by Budd Schulberg

Ringside: A Treasury of Boxing Reportage

Moving Pictures: Memories of a Hollywood Prince

On the Waterfront: The Final Shooting Script

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“They looked at each other until they weren't acquaintances any longer.” — 4 people liked it

“I suppose it's too bad people can't be a little more consistent. But if they were, maybe they would stop being people.” — 2 people liked it

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avg rating	preview: What Makes Sammy Run? Goodreads rating: 3.99 (594 ratings)
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BBCode	[url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/101191.What_Makes_Sammy_Run_?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book][img]http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1171476932l/101191.jpg[/img][/url] [url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/101191.What_Makes_Sammy_Run_?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book]What Makes Sammy Run? by Budd Schulberg[/url]

What Makes Sammy Run?

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