SOURCE: "Seekers of Hurt," in The Saturday Review of Literature, Vol. XXXIII, No. 41, October 14, 1950, pp. 37-8.

Hay was an American poet and critic. In the following review, she discusses characterization in The Injustice Collectors and praises Auchincloss for his "excellent portrait studies. "

The title of The Injustice Collectors derives from Dr. Edmund Bergler's "The Battle of the Conscience," where the phrase is used to describe neurotics who continually and unconsciously construct situations in which they are disappointed or mistreated. In his foreword Mr. Auchincloss says:

I do not purport to use the term in Dr. Bergler's exact medical sense, but in a wider sense to describe people who are looking for injustice, even in a friendly world, because they suffer from a hidden need to feel that this world has wronged them. Turning the idea over, one begins to speculate if punishment and injustice are not always more...