Author: Edward Lewis Wallant
February 15, 2016
“Although actor Rod Steiger played opposite such Hollywood greats as Marlon Brando, Jack Palance and Humphrey Bogart, he considered his best work was in Sidney Lumet’s 1964 film ‘The Pawnbroker,’ where he played Holocaust survivor Sol Nazerman, the pawnbroker of the title.
The novel on which the film was based, published in 1961, has now been reissued. The Pawnbroker by Edward Lewis Wallant (Fig Tree Books, 274 pp., $15.95 pb) has a new Foreword, by novelist Dara Horn, who calls the book ‘an absolute masterpiece.’
A finalist for a National Book Award, it was Wallant’s second novel. He died a year later, at the age of only 36.”
From a “book brief” by Gila Wertheimer for the Chicago Jewish Star, February 12-25, 2016.