Harvey Swados' collection of essays, A Radical's America (1962), has as its epigraph a sentence from Chekhov: "There ought to be, behind the door of every happy, contented man, someone standing with a hammer, continuously reminding him with a tap that there are unhappy people." Harvey Swados was continuously aware of the suffering and unhappiness in the world, and his two most important novels, Standing Fast (1970) and Celebration (1975), are about people who want to make a better world. These two books, like all his writing, are realistic, earnest, and ultimately optimistic.

Swados was born in Buffalo, New York, on 28 October 1920, the son of a physician. He once defined himself in four facets: Jew, socialist, novelist, and "middle-class man of the mid-century, born and brought up in a middle-sized American city." He graduated from the University of Michigan in 1940. Between 1942 and 1945 he served as a radio officer in the merchant...