Albert Halper, novelist, short-story writer, playwright, was born in Chicago--"in a raw slangy city in a raw slangy neighborhood"--3 August 1904. His parents, Lithuanian Jewish immigrants, had settled on Chicago's West Side, where his father ran a small grocery store. His formative years were shaped by the energy and spirit of his family, by their dreams of independence, by their honesty and their capacity for work. Growing up on the West Side had made him sensitive to the ironies of living, to the natural world that he sensed as wind and sun and the lake's shore, to the quirks and foibles of people. He grew up with the streets and noise and clatter of urban life; he worked in his father's store, as an errand boy for a downtown clothing store, as an order picker in a mail-order house, as a shipping clerk in an electrotype foundry...