Jo Sinclair (pseudonym for Ruth Seid) is best known for her descriptions of wastelands of self denial and self-destructiveness and of the torture they engender. Too often the reviews of Sinclair's novels are limited to criticism of her overly circumstantial accounts of characters' psychological backgrounds and to the discussion of her characters' problems with Jewish identification. However, Sinclair's interests are quite broad and her sympathy with characters from many backgrounds and suffering from many psychological afflictions is impressive. There is often a sociological perspective from which these sorrowing individuals are described, but it is their emotional responses to their lives that interest the author.

Sinclair was born to Jewish-Russian immigrants in Brooklyn, New York, but moved at age three with her parents, Nathan and Ida Kravetsky Seid, to Cleveland, where she still resides. Her careers have been many: she worked in a factory and on a WPA project...