"Published in 1946 and winner of the prestigious Harper Prize, Jo Sinclair's Wasteland was startling for its psychological precocity and for a boldness of social feeling that linked Jews, blacks, and homosexuals as cultural outsiders in a time when very few were able to make that parallel...Wasteland is a remarkable social document, a state-of-the-art observation of the American-Jewish situation in the early forties, made calmly, clearly, and in an undefended manner. Never again would there be such calm in American-Jewish novels. As the process of assimilation went inexorably forward (and American Jews simultaneously learned the full truth of the Holocaust), a kind of frenzy seized the writers. It was as though they were terrified of what they were doing... or rather, of what they were no longer free not to do... and they became slightly hysterical. Saul Bellow and Philip Roth made the words Jewish and manic synonymous. "What are we doing? What are we doing?" their novels scream at us, from Augie March on. Jo Sinclair reminds us of the quiet before the storm, of that moment of speculation and insight that precedes the turbulence of engagement. Her novel, unquestionably, is part of the record of an absorbing and complicated piece of life."