[2] She married Dr. Louis Schiff, a podiatrist,[3] and lived for some time on Boston's Beacon Hill, a few blocks away from the considerably less affluent Scollay Square.

At the time, Scollay Square was Boston's red-light district, as well as home to thousands of low-income and working-class residents; just a few years later, in the early 1960s, the neighborhood was razed to make room for Government Center.

In a 1953 interview, she said she could not have written the book without the support of her husband, who accompanied her several nights a week to the bars and nightclubs of Scollay Square to gather material.

The protagonist, Beth Prentiss, is an upper-class young woman from Beacon Hill who meets a sailor, Jerry Blake, in a Scollay Square tavern, and has an affair with him.

Through Jerry, Beth meets people whose backgrounds are different from her own, such as Emily Lazarro, an Italian waitress and single mother who lives in a North End tenement.

Oren Curtiss, a Globe reviewer writing in August 1952, predicted that the book would sell well, despite offending some readers, but called the plot "somewhat contrived".