The Measure of a Writer

An excerpt from an article printed by the Valley News about Dartmouth College alumnus Budd Schulberg:

"In December 1935, Budd Schulberg, a Dartmouth College junior and editor-in-chief of the daily paper The Dartmouth, traveled from Hanover some 60 miles west to Proctor, Vt., near Rutland, to report on a strike by men who worked the quarries for the Proctor Marble Company.

The 110 strikers, Poles, Swedes, Irish, Italians and Mexicans, Schulberg wrote in The Dartmouth, were 'desperate, no longer patient with equivocal leaders.' Their anger at their low wages, and the conditions in which they worked and their families lived, had lit a match to their discontent.

In impassioned prose, Schulberg wrote that 'a visit to the strike area is convincing evidence that it is easy to talk of our world-famous "American standard" but the actual struggle to achieve this standard is long and bitter. As long as such struggles exist so near our own campus, it is wishful thinking to contend that our geographical conditions force upon us an "ivory tower" existence.'

Nearly 20 years later, Schulberg would return to the subject of labor struggles, and the question of what is morally just, with his Academy Award-winning screenplay for the 1954 film On the Waterfront."

Read more here at the Valley News.