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What the critics said: |
| "It has understanding, pity, savagery, courage and sometimes a strange high beauty. It is written with a pace that rushes you along with it and a sureness that comes only of great skill. It is good to be present when such things happen. You feel the way you felt when John O'Hara's Appointment in Samarra was published -- proud and patriotic that another good novelist has come, and you are there to see his arrival." Dorothy Parker PM |
| "Brilliantly effective because it is completely of its time. The dialogue is a bit freer, less reticent than even that dialogue that shocked the early public of Hemingway. Sammy is a kind of conquistador from the gutter who had a talent for the double-cross. His portrait is vitriolic, never dull, and the comic aspects are given full appreciation. It is unquestionably one of the most interesting and promising first novels to appear in several years." Robert Van Gelder New York Times Book Review |
| "Headed straight for the best-seller lists!" Walter Winchell |
| "It is a grand book, utterly fearless and with a great deal of beauty side by side with the most bitter satire." F. Scott Fitzgerald |
| "As swiftly paced as a good movie, the novel probes at Hollywood, the frontier town of the big money, where, proportionately, there are more people getting swiftly rich and more people getting swiftly poor than in any other town in the world." James MacBride The New York Times March 30, 1941 (Complete review) |
| "The most promising first novel since Appointment in Samarra. Budd Schulberg writes like James M. Cain and John O'Hara at their best." Philadelphia Record |
| "An enthralling, flaying-alive book... Don't miss it!" Joseph Henry Jackson |
| "A clever and pointed picture of a man who wanted money and power and got them at the expense of his friends." The New Yorker |