The secret to Lord's success, according to the New York Herald Tribune's critic Stanley Walker, was that he used "a kind of literary pointillism, the arrangement of contrasting bits of fact and emotion in such a fashion that a vividly real impression of an event is conveyed to the reader."[6] Walker highlighted the way that Lord had avoided telling the story through the prism of social class, which had been the usual style of previous narratives, and instead successfully depicted the human element of the story by showing how those aboard reacted to the disaster whatever their class.[6]