"Youngblood Hawke is a tremendous novel, rich and meaty, full of wisdom and pain…. It's the veritable Big Balzac—the elusive challenge that American writers from Dreiser to today's Tom Wolfe have risen to with varying degrees of success. As searing and accurate a picture of New York in the late 1940s and 1950s as The Bonfire of the Vanities was of its period, Youngblood Hawke has the added bonus of a born novelist's heart beating beneath the surface. And icing the cake are some marvelous Hollywood sections, including the best agent-in-action-on-two-telephones scene ever captured in print. My guess is that Youngblood Hawke will be around as long as people are interested in sex, money, the creation of art, and characters who continue to blaze in a reader's memory long after the last page is turned."—LATimes