SOURCE: “Last Spree of the Middle Class,” in New York Herald Tribune Books, Sunday, February 24, 1935, p. 6.

In the following essay, Hicks praises the scope and depth of In Time of Peace.

Thomas Boyd's last novel, In Time of Peace, continues the story of the hero of his first, Through the Wheat, William Hicks, six months after he got out of the Army, was working a twelve-hour night shift in a Chicago machine shop. He threw up his job to go to another city to visit his girl. The girl, Patsy Hughes, wanted to see him wearing a white collar, and he succeeded in getting work on The Farmer-Labor Beacon.

A wife, a child, and mounting bills, to say nothing of increasing disillusionment with pseud-radicalism, sent Hicks from The Beacon to the more respectable News-Dispatch. The golden day dawned; prosperity came. Patsy got a job; Hicks had raises and...