SOURCE: "Cities of the Living: Disease and the Traveler in the Collected Stories of Wallace Stegner," in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 28. No. 4, Fall, 1992, pp. 509-15.

In the essay below, Zahlan studies how the main characters in "The Traveler" and "City of the Living" react to the foreign places to which they travel and how each reacts to the threat of illness and disease very differently.

Characterizing his short fiction as "rest stops" along life's journey, Wallace Stegner claims the Collected Stories to mark the itinerary in no significant order—they "lie as they fell." Nevertheless, the volume opens with "The Traveler" stalled on a snowy road in the American West, and closes in a hotel room with another traveler looking out on the Nile. In both stories men involuntarily break journeys, and in encountering boys confront themselves. The unnamed protagonist of "The Traveler" comes face to face...