Rich Man, Poor Man is a novel written by Irwin Shaw in 1969. It is the last of the novels of Shaw's middle period before he began to concentrate, in his last works such as Evening In Byzantium, Nightwork, Bread Upon The Waters, and Acceptable Losses, on the inevitability of impending death.
The novel is a sprawling work, with 665 pages, and covers many of the themes Shaw returns to again and again in all of his fiction - Americans living as expat...
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Rich Man, Poor Man is a novel written by Irwin Shaw in 1969. It is the last of the novels of Shaw's middle period before he began to concentrate, in his last works such as Evening In Byzantium, Nightwork, Bread Upon The Waters, and Acceptable Losses, on the inevitability of impending death.
The novel is a sprawling work, with 665 pages, and covers many of the themes Shaw returns to again and again in all of his fiction - Americans living as expatriates in Europe, the McCarthy era, children trying to break away from the kind of life lived by their parents, social and political issues of capitalism, the pain of relationships. On the very first page Shaw subtly telegraphs the sad ending of the story, in the same way that the first scene of a film will often quote the last scene.
Originally published as a short story in Playboy Magazine, it became an international bestseller when published as a novel. The bulk of the novel concerns the three children of Mary Pease and Axel Jordache - the...
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