SOURCE: "Twenty Years of Wallace Stegner," in College English, Vol. 20, No. 3, December, 1958, pp. 110-16.

In the following excerpted survey of Stegner's short fiction, Eisinger declares the author indecisive.

With the publication in 1956 of The City of the Living, a volume of short stories, Wallace Stegner rounded off the first twenty years of his writing career. Yet up to now no one has made an effort to evaluate his work or to place him. I should like to make a beginning by suggesting that Stegner, the author of nine volumes of fiction, is perhaps more important to contemporary literary history than he is to literature. Not that he isn't, especially in the short story, a writer of intrinsic interest. But he may with profit be regarded as a representative writer, in this Time of Hesitation, whose rejections and allegiances are characteristic of his time. He has rejected Marx, Darwin...