Hans Fallada, author of novels, short stories, semifictitious memoirs, children's books, and essays for newspapers and journals, is one of the most popular German writers of this century, whose sporadic success during his lifetime has turned into lasting posthumous appeal. Although from a fairly well-to-do bourgeois background, he wrote about--and for--the "little man," the common people, with whom he was in close contact during the various stages of his problem-ridden life. As an agricultural assistant in the Prussian provinces; accountant and inspector on several rural estates; inmate of sanatoria, asylums, and prisons; small-town journalist; employee in many odd jobs; mayor of a small community after Germany's collapse in 1945; and champion of the downtrodden "man in the street" in the metropolis of Berlin, Fallada was fellow companion, keen observer, and eloquent chronicler of the masses of "small people" on the social scale: petty bourgeoisie, laborers, low-ranking employees, proletarians, farmers...