SOURCE: "Literary Criticism and Short Fiction," in Wallace Stegner, Twayne Publishers, 1977, pp. 68-92.

In the following excerpt, the critics survey Stegner's short fiction, paying particular attention to "The Women on the Wall" and "Field Guide to the Western Birds."

The Short Fiction: Two Personae, One Theme

In the past four decades, Wallace Stegner has produced nearly fifty short stories. They have appeared in an impressive assortment of popular and scholarly publications. We find ten in Harper's, six in Mademoiselle, five in the Atlantic Monthly, and two or three each in Collier's, Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Redbook, the Inter-mountain, and Virginia Quarterly Review. Happily for the Stegner reader, over half of these tales—in general, the better half—have been republished in more permanent form. The first collection, The Women on the Wall, gathers together the best Stegner stories published from 1938 to 1946; the second, The City of the Living, includes those...