SOURCE: "The Outsider May Be You," New York Times, March 18, 1990, p. 2.

In the following assessment of Collected Stories, Tyler praises Stegner's tales, calling them "as solid as good furniture" and naming Stegner a master of the short story form.

Wallace Stegner has been steadily enriching readers' lives for more than half a century now, but he stopped writing short stories in the mid-1950's. As he tells us in the foreword to this collection, he believes the short story to be the province of younger writers. It is "made for discoveries and nuances and epiphanies," he says, "and superbly adapted for trial syntheses."

His admirers will take him any way they can get him—novels, essays, biographies—but after sinking into these stories gathered from "a lifetime of writing" we can't help but mourn the passing of his short-story days. These stories are so large, they're so wholehearted...