Daniel Fuchs was born in New York City. He attended public schools and received his B.A. in 1930 from the City College of New York and taught elementary school in Brooklyn for the next seven years. In 1932 he married Susan Hessen, and they have two sons, Jacob and Thomas. Fuchs's place in modern American fiction stems from his austere vision of life in the Jewish slum of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the locale of his trilogy of Depression-era novels, Summer in Williamsburg (1934), Homage to Blenholt (1936), and Low Company (1937). Fuchs portrays the immigrant and second-generation Jews struggling in deterministic environments of severe financial constraint and emotional bankruptcy. His characters, who respond to their landscape with schemes of petty chicanery and back-street dealings or self-delusive intellectual posturings, lead lives of alternately quiet and boisterous desperation.

In each of the Williamsburg novels, Fuchs betrays much sympathy for one particular type of character, the...