Best known as the basis for the classic film starring Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster, and soon to be a major Broadway play, Sweet Smell of Success is a dark and gripping novella about media manipulation and the will to get ahead — by any means necessary. Lehman scathingly depicts the dark side of success through the twisted relationship of Sidney Falco, an ambitious publicist, and J.J. Hunsecker, a powerful and vindictive gossip columnist, fashioned after Walter Winchell. As scandals are manufactured and reputations ruined for sport, the story spirals downward toward one last, savage act of revenge. As brutally honest as Nathanael West?s The Day of the Locust, Sweet Smell of Success is one of the most enduring and provocative stories in the literature of show business.

This collection of the long out-of-print fiction of Ernest Lehman also includes the novella The Comedian, a scathing portrait of the sordid private life of a famous funnyman. The book is rounded out by thirteen off-beat and brilliant short stories about Broadway and the big time that ruthlessly dissect the world behind the bright lights and happy endings.

"Ernest Lehman has been mercifully resurrected. See, there is a ?God.?" Vanity Fair

"Before his fame as a screenwriter (North by Northwest, The Sound of Music, West Side Story, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, etc.), Lehman wrote short stories, the most famous of which, 'Tell Me About It Tomorrow,' became the hugely atmospheric, sleazy film classic Sweet Smell of Success (1957), whose totally artificial but fabulously acidic dialogue was boosted by co-screenwriter Clifford Odets's razory cynicism....In its day Lehman's story 'The Comedian' was probably his second most well-known work, telling as it does of grotesquely unsympathetic Sammy Hogarth, the nation's more beloved TV comic, whose new show is so hot that it's about to open on three networks at once, to the biggest audience ever. But a banana peel awaits the funnyman: his own character flaw. The other 11 stories also pull down the pants of Broadway and show biz. Siddown. Listen to these. They are not Lindy's cheesecake or long on kisses and schmaltz. But if you like prose pale as a shark's belly, they do just fine." Kirkus Reviews

Nominated for five Academy Awards, ERNEST LEHMAN is Hollywood?s most literary screenwriter. He won a Golden Globe for his work on Billy Wilder?s Sabrina, and wrote such classics as Who?s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, North by Northwest, West Side Story, Hello Dolly!, The Sound of Music, and The King and I. He produced Hello Dolly! and Who?s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and directed Portnoy?s Complaint. He lives in Hollywood.