Fuchs himself certainly felt the frustration of the unrecognized artist. Though such luminaries as James T. Farrell and Alfred Kazin praised his Williamsburg trilogy, the books were not commercial successes, and Fuchs went to Hollywood in 1937, where he continues to live and work.
Summer in Williamsburg establishes both the mood and method that dominate Fuchs's fiction. In reserved and controlled prose, Fuchs sketches the gray lives of Williamsburg's tenement denizens, who scratch out paltry existences, dreaming of the big break that will free them from Ripple Street. In a structure of parallel stories, the book traces their scrabbling and striving. The main characters seem to be either hustlers or dreamers, confidence-men or ghetto philosophers. Most notable among the gentle thinkers is twenty-year-old Philip Hayman, whose literary airs and romantic tentativeness frustrate his pragmatic girl friend Tessie into marrying a stable though dull and boorish salesman. Philip's subsequent romance with wealthy Ruth Kelman fails as he is jarred into recognizing that his artistic aspirations are unreachable without the "vulgar" freedom afforded by money.
The theme of the intrusive power of financial matters is carried forward primarily in the ongoing story of Papravel, a minor hoodlum who strong-arms his competitors to secure lucrative bus routes from Brooklyn to the Catskill mountain resort areas.
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