When Edward Lewis Wallant died of a stroke resulting from a cerebral aneurysm in 1962, at the age of thirty-six, he had been a published novelist for less than three years and a writer of serious fiction for little more than twice that. Yet Wallant had already gained recognition as one of the most important figures among postwar Jewish writers in the United States. His first published novel, The Human Season (1960), received the Daroff Memorial Fiction Award for the best novel of the year on a Jewish theme--an award since renamed for Wallant. His next work, The Pawnbroker (1961), a treatment of the Holocaust, firmly established Wallant as a major literary talent. Remarkably, Wallant's two posthumously published novels, The Tenants of Moonbloom (1963) and The Children at the Gate (1964), revealed their author's stark departure from the formula of his early successes, anticipating developments that have subsequently taken place in American-Jewish literature...