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You are here: Home > Fiction > Literary Fiction > On the Waterfront > Review

Author: Budd Schulberg

Genre: Literary Fiction
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 9780749080297
Pages: 278
Rights: UK and Comm excluding Canada
Pub. Date: 2008-03-24

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Price: £7.99

Format: Paperback

Recommend this book

 The original novel of the Oscar-winning classic film

Former boxer Terry Malloy and his brother Charley, the crooked lawyer known to all as 'the Gent', are members of the tough, mobster-connected New York Longshoremen Union, run by Johnny Friendly. Johnny and his goons rule the waterfront with an iron fist, meaning that if you want to stay alive, you do things Johnny's way: plead 'D & D' - deaf and dumb.

Slow-witted and illiterate, Terry is happy to do any work he can get. But when he is inadvertently caught up in one of Johnny's rub-outs, guilt engenders the beginnings of a conscience in him. Katie is that conscience. Sister to the murdered man, she is torn between her belief that Terry killed her brother and her growing love for him. Together with the idealistic Catholic priest, Father Peter Barry, Terry and Katie attempt to take on the gangster-ridden waterfront unions of Johnny Friendly, but at severe personal cost to themselves.

On The Waterfront is one of the most gripping tales of political corruption and individual heroism of our time. The 1954 film, starring Marlon Brando, achieved massive critical acclaim and went on to win eight Oscars, including Best Actor for Brando as well as Best Film and Best Screenplay for Schulberg. On The Waterfront is rightly considered a modern classic and is as powerful a read today as it was fifty years ago.