In the writing of fiction, talent came almost as easily to Daniel Fuchs as to Willie Mays in the hitting of baseballs. There is a kind of performer whom we call "a natural," so completely do his gifts appear to be spontaneous and inborn; and Daniel Fuchs was precisely that, the natural as writer. In the mid-Thirties … he published three novels in quick succession—Summer in Williamsburg, Homage to Blenholt, and Low Company….
Fuchs drew upon his own experience as a boy growing up in Williamsburg, that grimy edge of Brooklyn where for decades poor Jews had been struggling for bread and air; but his work was marvelously free of the self-pity and proclaimed sensitivity that mar so much autobiographical fiction. A small-scale comédie humaine of immigrant life, Fuchs' trilogy is notable for vividness of picture and comely form, yet also troubling for the vision it releases—a vision of man's days inexorably entangled with meanness, betrayal, and exhaustion….
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