The 'thirties, in America even more than in England, was the period of socially conscious fiction and of much theorizing about what was called the proletarian novel. Inevitably, Call It Sleep was seen as an attempt at a proletarian novel; or it was judged that it would have been a better book if it had been a proletarian novel…. (p. 443)

Call It Sleep must be the most powerful evocation of the terrors of childhood ever written. Lost, bewildered, friendless, the small boy David scuttles through the streets of the Lower East Side like a frightened little animal lost in a jungle inhabited by the larger carnivores. We are spared nothing of the crudeness of cosmopolitan slum life and living…. And all the terrors the boy experiences in the streets of New York are brought together, symbolized, in his fear of the tenement houses in which he lives, the...