Although Albert Halper published his first novel during Thirties and sometimes linked with proletarian school of writers, he has, on whole, been less concerned with struggle of classes than with struggle of people. Clearly his writing reflects social and economic problems of Twenties and Thirties: he writes of communist demonstrations and strikes and labor meetings; he writes of lower and middle classes, of little from New York's Union Square and Chicago's Kedzie Avenue. But it not heroic achievement of an individual, not reform as such that concerns him; his major concern with inner thoughts and feelings of people, their dreams, their sicknesses and frustrations, their capacities to crack a joke and carry on. In three novels published during Thirties Union Square (1933), The Foundry (1934), and The Chute (1937)--Halper writes sympathetically of both worker and executive, both dreamer and schemer, and of all assorted types who seem forever amateurs in grim business of living and getting ahead. And because personal experience introduced him to problems of an era, so novels read, after all, like social history, and they merit critical attention, not only for their wit and sensitive insight into thought and feeling and action of a world gone crash, but also for their stylistic techniques and symbolic portrayals of thought and feeling and relationships of people as they make their way through a jungle of machines, a series of economic dilemmas, a world of personal and public losses. Working in literary tradition of Twain and Zola, of Dreiser and S erwood Anderson, Halper believes that the first concern of a novelist to see life clearly, and as whole as may be, and then to tell truth about it.' Whatever his interest in worker, in Marxian doctrine and communist ideology, writing of a novel, he declares, is rooted in story telling, and in creation of charcter. Indeed, writing a very, very personal business2 that requires most difficult thing of all, 'deep honesty of self.' The novels and, more especially, short stories are written from experience. As he says of stories,