[4] He was a reporter and cartoonist for newspapers in Salina, Kansas; Los Angeles, California, and, by 1937, Seattle, Washington.
A friend, Charles Harris Garrigues, wrote that Foster writes, paints, and has been called the second most promising of the young poets in America by the Lit Dig [Literary Digest'] — doesn't know one note of music from another and improvises the most beautiful piano music .
He roomed down at the house for a while until we had a fight over a novel he's writing and then he moved out — went on a three weeks' drunk and only started back to work when I threatened to knock his block off if he didn't.
In the brief declarative sentences of his prose style, in his method of consistent understatement, in his attitude of weary and rather self-conscious disillusionment, he has aligned himself with the school of Hemingway and his imitators.
Several scenes are reminiscent of the tawdry political atmosphere rendered in Ben Hecht's and Charles MacArthur's 1928 play, The Front Page.".
[3]: 192 Los Angeles Times reviewer Milton Merlin said that the work was: not an entirely satisfying novel, but it is an ambitious enterprise and an exceptionally compelling story told with feeling and facility.
Shelby's recollections, stirred by a pile of old, crumbling letters in the attic, cover a span of three generations .
About his final book, The Dusty Godmother (1949), reviewer A.C. Spectorsky wrote in the New York Times that Foster had expanded a slick-magazine short story into a light novel which disappoints largely because it has frequent and unfulfilled intimations and overtones of being far more than just that.