The mid-1920's in America are remembered as a time of prosperity and expansiveness, and the literature of those years shows us the Babbitts, the Gatsbys, and the Dodsworths living in a confident and careless country. But ["Tomorrow Will Be Better"] pictures the little people, whose lives are made up of poverty and postponements, in the mean streets and up the dark stairways that prosperity never finds. Through the cycles of economic change they carry their gnawing worries, their secret resentments, and their wistful dreams of tomorrow….

"Tomorrow Will Be Better" is a commonplace story, deliberately strung together of commonplace experience. It is a sequence, told in a level, unvarying key, of family scenes, office scenes, a routine courtship, a hopeful marriage, and finally, still in the muted key, a stillbirth in a makeshift Brooklyn hospital. Often the story is warm, real, poignant in its picture of hurtful...