Like Bottom Dogs, [Dahlberg's] early novels, From Flushing to Calvary and Those Who Perish, were socially committed. They arose from his own political experience of the opposed extremities of Stalinism and Nazism. More deeply, they were fed by his own anger at injustice. They were written in a colloquial style suited, as was thought, to the proletariat that was supposed to be reading New Masses. These novels received critical attention but they showed no artistic growth, so Dahlberg, who meanwhile had fallen out with the Communists and who had genuine literary ambitions, ceased writing and began to read. Repudiating writing that had an immediate social purpose, he entered a period of silence that was so prolonged he published only three new books in the quarter-century that preceded 1960. Thereafter, he published an average of a book a year—an astonishing burst of activity for a man of his age...