In 1990 Joyce Carol Oates won both the Elmer Holmes Bobst Lifetime Achievement Award in Fiction and the Rea Award for the Short Story, a twenty-five-thousand-dollar prize that honors living American writers "who have made significant contributions to the story as an art form." The convergence of these two awards suggests not only Oates's literary achievement but the significant place of her short fiction within that achievement. Oates's first publications were short stories, and from the beginning her superiority in that genre has been recognized. Linda W. Wagner notes in her useful review of Oates's critical reception through 1978 (in Critical Essays on Joyce Carol Oates, 1979) that early collections were consistently well received and, in fact, provided a standard of excellence that some critics held against her first novels.

In her Joyce Carol Oates: An Annotated Bibliography (1986) Francine Lercangée provides 416 separate entries on stories, and, since that enumeration...