Excerpt

During the mid-1930s, Daniel Fuchs (born in 1909) published his three accounts of tenement life in New York; they hold a significant, if not prominent, place in the literary history of the Jewish-American novel and have been republished periodically. In the late thirties, Fuchs moved to Hollywood, part of the literary migration into the film industry (he once worked briefly with William Faulkner). He would continue to write fiction, now with a California focus, thematically comparable to West's The Day of the Locust, although in a very different register. Some of this writing would appear in the New Yorker, and…