Eugène Dabit's corpus of novels and shorter fiction represents one of the more important achievements among the many left-wing French writers of the 1930s. Although he left school at an early age and was largely self-taught, he over-came a number of social and educational handicaps in order to become a painter and an art critic as well as a fiction writer.

Born of a mother who was illegitimate and a father who worked as a teamster, Dabit produced five novels, a volume each of novellas, short stories, and childhood reminiscences, and a great many book reviews and short pieces of art criticism in the seven-year span beginning at the end of 1929. Not long after his death, his publisher, the prestigious house of Gallimard, brought out three more volumes of his work: a book of art criticism, and uncompleted novel, and, finally, his private diary.

Not only...