According to his introduction, Algren's concern in this collection is with the relationship between fiction and society. These short stories, published since the early 1930s in such magazines as American Mercury, the Southern Review, and Harper's, all spring from "identification with those whom our civilization has discarded." These stories dramatize the distinction between "the mere academician and the writer whose task is to reveal the way things are with us." In the opening of "The Captain Has Bad Dreams," set as are the first scenes of so many Algren works in the ubiquitous station house, the tough Captain is inwardly haunted by the identification with the prisoners he both owns and denies. "A Bottle of Milk for Mother," perhaps the most well-known and representative of all these stories, begins with a favorite quotation from Whitman, "I feel I am of them — /I belong to these...