SOURCE: “Find Hortense,” in The Nation, December 1, 1997, pp. 34-6.

In the following review, Allen provides an overview of Calisher's literary career and offers a positive evaluation of In the Slammer and The Novellas of Hortense Calisher.

Hortense Calisher, who was born in 1911 and has been producing highly original and frequently highly acclaimed fiction for half a century, is the odd-woman-out of the contemporary American literary pantheon. There’s no entry for her in the most recent Britannica, and not so much as a mention in Frederick Karl’s numbingly comprehensive American Fictions: 1940–1980, published in 1983. One looks in vain through critical studies of novelists and story writers from the fifties to the present day for even token consideration of a writer who has often (if inconsistently) excelled in both genres—whose 1975 Collected Stories was in fact generally acclaimed by reviewers as one of the finest such collections of our...