In these stories and sketches, written when he was undergoing rigorous Reichian psychoanalysis and establishing himself as a young man of letters in Greenwich Village, the mature Goodman begins to emerge¿here, at last, is the storyteller as critic of society, the first-person essayist as pilgrim of the soul. Plot, character, and setting now become secondary to the narrator's criticism of American life and insights into personal psychology¿this is fiction as the record of an inward search toward hard-won self-understanding. In these stories, writes Stoehr, "Goodman found a new way to cope with the old problem of alienation, of the relations of the ego to the soul and to the world: accept the world, in which natural powers and beautiful human virtues do exist (no matter what other intellectuals think); accept the ego as that part of the self which makes daring formulations about the world; accept the soul, from whose depths come song."