This listing is for The Sergeant Mass Market Paperback 1968 by Dennis Murphy.  

Mass Market Paperback: 158 pages

Publisher: McFadden; First Mcfadden Edition edition (1968)

A graphic, unflinching novel about a shadow world within the U.S. Army. Rod Steiger immortalized the complex, conflicted character of the 'The Sergeant' in the 1968 movie of the same name by Dennis Murphy, a California novelist and screenwriter who inherited his friend John Steinbeck's gift for realism and psychology in depicting otherwise ordinary people under extraordinary pressure from their flaws and compulsions and crises of their own making. Murphy was the son of John Murphy, Steinbeck's boyhood pal in Salinas and, as revealed by letters from the older author to the younger writer and his father, in many ways Steinbeck's literary heir. Unfortunately it was an inheritance squandered by success in Hollywood, where Murphy made money in movies despite Steinbeck's caution about the traps waiting for talent, like Murphy's, in Tinseltown. If you liked the movie, a cult classic worth watching for Murphy's taut writing and Steiger's explosive performance, read the novel, an amazing treatment of repressed homosexuality years ahead of its time. Steinbeck quarreled with the ending but praised the effort, to Murphy's deep gratitude. Too bad it remains the only surviving sign of Murphy's prodigious skill as a novelist.

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