SOURCE: “Coming Down from the Heights,” in Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Vol. 31, No. 4, Winter, 1989, pp. 554-69.

In the following essay, Snodgrass examines the related themes in Textures of Life, Queenie, and Eagle Eye, drawing attention to the movement from ideal to real and symbolic to literal in each.

Like many a beginning writer, Hortense Calisher drew first on her own life history, but, as she relates in her memoir Herself, “suddenly after less than a dozen close-to-autobiographical stories, their process is over; I want out, to the wider world” (H, 42).¹ However much the stories, novellas, and novels that followed this change in direction differ from the early stories in their subjects and styles, the rites of passage theme proved to be an enduring and ever developing one. The Hester Elkin of the autobiographical stories is the first of many Calisher protagonists to come out into a...