Life in small-town America has always been fertile territory for writers, and Jackson mines his own childhood in these sharply observed stories of upstate New York in the 1920s, exposing the seamy reality behind the ideal of the white picket fence. Published first in 1950, the subjects were controversial and provocative, and in some cases read shockingly to us even now, and this may explain why the collection has never before been published in the UK. Jackson is best known for The Lost Weekend, and it is the childhood of that novel's protagonist, Don Birnam, that Jackson presents here.