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...