Hungry Hearts, by Anzia Yezierska (Penguin, £6.99 in UK)

Born in a Jewish community in Poland, Anzia Yezierska came as a child to New York in 1890 and lived the life of thousands of other penniless immigrants, in tumbledown West Side tenements and in the sweated labour which was all most of them could hope for. Later, however, she became a struggling teacher and mixed in radical feminist circles before becoming a writer. These stories, first published in 1920, are raw, strong, occasionally sentimental, but with a rank odour of reality. They are, in fact, slices of life as much as fiction, in that tradition of American social realism which harks back to Dreiser. Hollywood made them into a sentimental film, which brought their creator a good deal of money but apparently little happiness. B.F.