After he had written the three novels Never Love a Stranger (1948), A Stone for Danny Fisher, and 79 Park Avenue (1955), Robbins came to see them as forming a trilogy which he calls The Depression in Neiu York. These are parallel stories involving different characters but all illustrating the struggle for survival of the lower middle classes during the Depression.

Never Love a Stranger is, with regard to incident and characterization, an intensely autobiographical novel. Even the name of the hero is Frankie Kane, the name Robbins received when he was, like his hero, a foundling, but Robbins imposes his fine sense of plot closure on the materials of his life up to this time (many of them reused, of course, in A Stone for Danny Fisher). The point of view of this novel is of interest because it has the same advantages for storytelling as the point...