On the Waterfront, reissued

The estimable Chicago publisher Ivan R. Dee is reissuing Budd Schulberg's On The Waterfront, which he wrote after writing the screenplay for the great film of the same name.

“The film’s concentration on a single dominating character, brought close to the camera eye, made it esthetically inconvenient, if not impossible, to set Terry’s story in its social and historical perspective,” Schulberg wrote. “In the novel Terry is a single strand in a rope of intertwining fibers, suggesting the knotted complexities of the world of the waterfront that loops around New York.”

I've already read the book, and it does indeed have much more of an epic sweep than the Terry Malloy-focused film (which is no knock whatsoever on the film - when you have an actor of such magnetism and power as the young Marlon Brando, you'd be crazy not to focus on him). In particular, the novel develops the character of Father Barry much further than the film. And while I don't want to be a spoiler, I will say that the book ends much differently (and realistically) than the thrilling finale of the film. Read it and you'll see what I mean.