Howard Breslin

Another one of his short stories was the basis for the film Platinum High School (1960; MGM), directed by Charles Haas, with the screenplay by Robert Smith, and starring Mickey Rooney.

He used his Irish family and childhood for his novel Let Go of Yesterday (1950) which is set in the Irish South Bronx.

The Tamarack Tree (1947) set Breslin on his path as a novelist, earning him a Literary Guild and receiving critical acclaim.

He left a lucrative job writing radio scripts, making $750 a week by 1946 (an estimated $9757.54 in 2018 dollars), to become a novelist because he was unhappy. He had published The Piper's Son but with limited success. To make ends meet he published short stories.

In 1946 he wrote the short story "Bad Time at Honda", and it appeared in The American Magazine in January 1947, with full-color illustrations by Robert Fawcett. That story became the film Bad Day at Black Rock, the script adapted by Don McGuire and Millard Kaufman, directed by John Sturges, and starring Spencer Tracy.

At the end of his life he was living at 331 East 71st Street in Manhattan. Breslin died after a short illness at St. Luke's Hospital, New York City.

He graduated from Regis High School in 1932, and then earned a Bachelor of Arts degree summa cum laude in 1936 from Manhattan College, in Riverdale, Bronx, New York. While at Manhattan College he was an editor for The Quadrangle, the college newspaper and editor of the yearbook.

Howard Mary Breslin (23 December 1912 – 30 May 1964) was an American novelist and radio script writer. He mainly wrote novels of historical fiction and is most notable for The Tamarack Tree and "Bad Time at Honda", a short story that was the basis of the film Bad Day at Black Rock. He also published under the nom de plume Michael Niall.