The crowd is the American landscape: indelible characters drawn coast-to-coast from the teeming streets of New York to tables at Hollywood's legendary nightclub, Ciro's. In these sparkling stories, Schulberg brings us vivid, restless people haunted by abrupt failure in the wake of rapid success. In "The Arkansas Traveler" he gives us Larry "Lonesome" Rhodes's down-home stories of Riddle, Arkansas, which later became the stuff of the celebrated movie A Face in the Crowd.