Edward Lewis Wallant belongs to a generation of American writers, such as Flannery O'Connor, John Updike, and Philip Roth, who came to their maturity in the 1950s and 1960s. Addressing the Faustian and Promethean excesses of the time, Wallant's fiction seeks a human answer to nihilism and despair. Each of his four novels focuses upon a man in mourning and retreat from life, who fails at his attempts to inure himself from involvement with others only to rediscover, through suffering, his own humanity and a new sense of human solidarity. Facing squarely the enormities of modern history, especially the nightmare of the Holocaust, Wallant's fiction offers an affirmative vision of moral and spiritual redemption.

Born on 19 October 1926, in New Haven, Connecticut, Wallant was the only child of Sol Ellis and Ann Mendel Wallant. His father, who had been disabled by mustard gas during World War I, died of...