[1] Kriegel first taught at Long Island University, before teaching at the City College of New York and becoming director of its Center for Worker Education.
The memoir bluntly described his experience with polio and his resulting anger, and utilized the term "cripple" at his insistence[1] (a phrase that would be used throughout his later works).
[3][4] He recounted telling his wife how he wanted his work to be "free of the sentimentality and cant and papier-mâché religiosity usually found in such books", at a time when it was uncommon to openly talk about the illness.
[1] Richard Shepard described the memoir in The New York Times as "superb craft and keen insight ... written without a trace of false sentimentality or phony revelation".
Another reviewer, in the Chicago Tribune, noted that it had "flashes of insight and self-understanding amid sordidness and frequently unnecessary obscene realism".
[1] Kriegel went on to author several other books, including Working Through: A Teacher’s Journey in the Urban University (1972), Notes for the Two-Dollar Window: Portraits From an American Neighborhood (1976), On Men and Manhood (1979), and Quitting Time (1982).