His nonfiction The Poorhouse State: The American Way of Life On Public Assistance evolved from those experiences; he spent two years interviewing people on relief on New York's Lower East Side.
Between 1963 and 1966 much of Elman's income came from writing freelance pieces for magazines, including Cavalier, Commonweal, The Nation, and The New Republic.
Each novel tells the same story from a different point of view about the fate of the Yagodahs, a Hungarian family at the end of World War II.
He traveled on assignment for GEO (magazine) with the photojournalist Susan Meiselas and his text accompanied her photos of the Sandinistan rebels.
His book of poems In Chontales, his comic novel The Menu Cypher, and his collection of stories Disco Frito are all set in Nicaragua.
In his novel Tar Beach, Elman returned to the subject of family life in Brooklyn after World War II.
"[17] His book of poems Cathedral-Tree-Train (1992) is a brooding, unsentimental but loving elegy for a friend, abstract-expressionist painter Keith Sanzenbach.
The book consists of brief portraits of people he met, including Isaac Bashevis Singer, Faye Dunaway, Richard Penniman, and Louise Varèse.
Adele Sarkissisan, Gale Research Company, Detroit, Michigan, 1986. Review of Cocktails at Somoza's in The Boston Phoenix