Poverty and Crime

Most of the protagonists in the collection live in poverty or near to poverty. Even the occasional wealthy character, such as Lydia Walsh in Lost in the City, comes from a childhood of poverty. Some characters, such as Marie Wilson in Marie, live on government payments while others work long hours for little pay. With few exceptions, then, the working characters presented work hard for their livelihoods and these working characters are by and large honorable, honest, and trustworthy. Within the setting of urban poverty, many of the characters in the collection have abandoned an honest day's work for a life of crime. Caesar Matthews in Young lions is an early example of this. He grows up in a lower middle-class family with a strong father figure but rejects this life as fruitless and turns to a life of crime. Within a few years, he is...