Irwin Shaw Books in Order

In Shaw's early antiwar play, six dead soldiers rise from a mass grave and refuse to be buried. Their stand turns the stage into a furious argument about duty, grief, and the machinery of war.

Shaw's first story collection moves through Depression-era streets, working lives, bruised marriages, and political anger. It also includes The Girls in Their Summer Dresses, one of his best-known and most durable stories.

These wartime stories follow soldiers and civilians under pressure, where fear, prejudice, and chance can change everything. The collection includes some of Shaw's strongest short fiction about World War II and its moral strain.

Shaw follows three soldiers through World War II, a German sergeant, a Jewish American infantryman, and a disillusioned American in uniform. Their crossing stories make the war feel vast, intimate, and brutally human.

This large collection gathers stories of city life, marriage, ambition, war, and Jewish identity from across Shaw's early career. The range is wide, but the mood stays sharp, humane, and alert to how people fail each other.

Radio producer Clement Archer is ordered to fire colleagues accused of being communists or face public ruin himself. Shaw turns the blacklist era into a tense moral drama about fear, compromise, and conscience.

During his son's baseball game, Benjamin Federov looks back over fifty years of American life, family, love, and war. The novel moves through memory with warmth, regret, and the ache of time passing.

In 1937, Lucy Crown is trapped in a chilly marriage and drawn to her frail son's young companion. One brief affair reshapes a family, and the novel follows the damage, distance, and longing that linger for years.

Set largely among Americans abroad, these stories deal in bad bets, compromised loyalties, and lives slightly off balance. The title piece follows a washed-up former pilot lured toward risky, shady work.

Actor John Andrus thinks a trip to Rome may be his last good break. Instead he lands in a whirl of movie-set politics, old resentments, and romantic complications that make every day less certain.

A curated introduction to Shaw's short fiction, this volume brings together many of his most anthologized pieces. Expect urban marriages, wartime tension, lost chances, and the clean, driving storytelling that made him famous.

Shaw turns to nonfiction in this easygoing memoir of a Mediterranean sailing trip with his family. From St. Tropez to Venice, it mixes travel, small mishaps, and the pleasure of seeing Europe from the water.

These stories circle around love, loneliness, and the awkward ways people miss one another. Moving between America and Europe, Shaw writes about marriages, affairs, and private disappointments without losing his eye for comedy.

Rudolph, Tom, and Gretchen Jordache grow up in a hard family on the Hudson and push toward very different futures. This big postwar saga tracks love, money, class, and the bruising ways families shape a life.

Three novellas trace people pushed into strange situations and hard choices. The stories are brisk, ironic, and often unsettling, with Shaw watching how quickly confidence can turn into confusion or danger.

At Cannes, a once celebrated filmmaker tries to rescue a career that has been slipping away. Behind the Riviera glamour, Shaw builds a tense, weary story about ambition, memory, and the private cost of success.

Five long stories look at grief, desperation, and the odd turns that unsettle ordinary lives. It is a later collection, darker in mood, but still full of Shaw's quick pacing and sharp emotional observation.

Grounded pilot Douglas Grimes is stuck working nights at a shabby hotel until a dead guest leaves a fortune within reach. Easy money draws him into European schemes, elegant criminals, and trouble that keeps getting worse.

After violence pulls the Jordache clan back together, Tom's son Wesley goes looking for answers about his father's death. The sequel widens the family saga with old grudges, new dangers, and another generation under pressure.

Part travelogue, part love letter, this book wanders through Paris after the war, from cafe tables to side streets and changing seasons. Shaw writes about the city's moods, habits, and pleasures with a sharp, affectionate eye.

Spanning five decades and sixty-three pieces, this big collection shows Shaw at work across war stories, city tales, family dramas, and quiet heartbreaks. It is the broadest single view of his short fiction.

A restless New York businessman becomes addicted to danger, from skydiving to extreme skiing. As he sheds his job, marriage, and old life, the search for exhilaration slowly turns into a search for meaning.

A Manhattan family helps a mugging victim and learns he is a powerful Wall Street lawyer. His gratitude opens doors, but every favor comes with a price, and the Strands begin losing sight of what matters.

Roger Damon is a successful literary agent until an anonymous caller threatens to expose old sins. As he digs through his past for answers, the search puts his family, friends, and carefully built life at risk.

This collection brings together stories of war, travel, marriage, and moral unease. The title piece, set around the German retreat from Paris, gives the book a haunted edge, but the rest ranges widely in place and tone.

Shaw's second collection turns a hard look on Depression-era America, especially working people squeezed by money and class. The stories are political without preaching, and full of city pressure, ambition, and disappointment.