The Reinhart series follows loosely in the tradition of nineteenth century social realists, like Anthony Trollope and Henry James, who chronicled the social changes of several decades. A more obvious precedent in American literature is the fiction of Ernest Hemingway, particularly the Nick Adams stories, and another may be the extensive folk saga of William Faulkner, which sometimes traces the changes in a character in differing eras. The fiction of Berger's contemporaries and near contemporaries like Saul Bellow and John Updike also provides either precedents or parallels. Updike has been describing the progress of his middle class hero, Rabbit Angstrom, over a period of three decades in novels that seem to have appeared almost concurrently with Berger's Reinhart series.