Although he has received scant critical and scholarly attention, Wallace Markfield deserves recognition as a very talented chronicler of the urban world of second-generation Jews in America. Like the early Bernard Malamud, he concentrates on the working-class and lower-middle-class milieu of the 1930s through the 1950s. Like Philip Roth, his viewpoint is largely satirical, though more affectionately so, as he traces the transition from the culture of the candy store and the movies to the culture of the universities and the literary quarterlies. He is keen-witted and sometimes wickedly funny, in the manner of black humor, and his work is as saturated with the details of popular culture and recent political history as the fiction of Irvin Faust. These comparisons with others in the crowded field of competent Jewish writers suggest two probable reasons for the lack of critical recognition of a writer who merits attention. He lacks...