SOURCE: A review of Childhood and Other Neighborhoods, in Northwest Review, Vol. XVIII, No. 3, 1980, pp. 149-57.

In the following excerpt, Ward discusses the inner city lives Dybek portrays in his Childhood and Other Neighborhoods.

If this tone of apocalypse and condemnation is where Otto's work leaves off, it is where Stuart Dybek's Childhood and Other Neighborhoods begins. Where Otto's stories depend for their effect on his characters' complacency, Dybek's are stories of the inner city, a panorama of ruined lives overcome by the refuse of civilization. In these longer, carefully crafted stories set in the Chicago of the 40's, 50's and 60's, Dybek's technique is a no-holds-barred assault on everything we may have smugly assumed was reality. Though his characters appear to have vitality in a world they are forced to scrape a living from, in truth they are cripples who manage only to fend off the total...