When Tucker's People was published in 1943 it was praised by the New York Times for its blowtorch intensity. The idea for Tucker's People stemmed from Ira Wolfert's coverage as a reporter of the trial of James Jimmy Hines, a Tammany Hall district leader who was prosecuted by Thomas E. Dewey for letting Dutch Schultz take over the numbers game in New York. It is a penetrating, sympathetic novel of frustration and insecurity, a story of little people, many of them decent people, battling against forces they are too feeble to resist and too simple to understand, according to the Saturday Review of Literature.