These early years are described in a semi-autobiographical short story, "The Robbers,"[1] by Daniel, and in "Streets, A Memoir of the Lower East Side," written by Bella.

During the Vietnam War era, he became absorbed by the ethical choices raised by this conflict and was one of the first reporters to expose military atrocities against the Vietnamese civilian population.

Toward the end of his writing career, he interviewed aging Germans, former Flakhelfer, about their role in the Third Reich, returning to his focus on how individuals can become implicated in evil through denial and the refusal to acknowledge reality.

Many of his New Yorker articles were collected and published in book form and translated into various languages including Spanish, Dutch, German, Polish and Japanese.

He tried very hard to understand the people he wrote about, and far more often than not he succeeded.”[4] And in the words of author John Hersey, “In all his years of writing, Dan never touched...a trivial subject.

He approached our minds and hearts very simply, in a storyteller's way, through tales about people faced with the great dilemmas of our time.” [5] In addition to journalism, Lang wrote poetry, children’s literature, short stories and an opera libretto.