James Hanley has been discovered and rediscovered for almost half a century. When his last book came out in 1973, Time magazine, calling him "one of the most consistently praised and least-known novelists in the English-speaking world," echoed its judgment of 20 years before: "If critics' raves paid their way in royalties … Hanley might well be one of the richest authors alive."…

His earlier novels—more than 20—have been accorded a respectful neglect, not because he is particularly obscure or avant-garde, but because odd accidents of timing and shifts in public taste throughout his long career have resulted in such audiences as he has had being cut off from one another. In the case of his most ambitious undertakings, for example, a five-volume family saga of working-class life, many reviewers of the fifth book in 1958 were unaware that it was part of a cycle begun in 1935.

Much that Hanley has...