SOURCE: "Wallace Stegner: Lessons of The Master," in Book World, Vol. XX, No. 13, April 1, 1990, p. 7.

In the following estimation of Collected Stories, Garrett appreciates Stegner's ability to present, with equal believability, a wide range of characters and situations.

Here we have 31 short stories, gathered out of Wallace Stegner's two earlier collections, The Women on the Wall (1950) and The City of the Living (1956), together with some others that, in various forms, found a place in several of his novels including, most recently, Recapitulation (1979). Stegner's first book, the novel Remembering Laughter, was published in 1937. Since then he has published 14 other works of fiction, 10 books of nonfiction, and has edited The Letters of Bernard DeVoto (1975). He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Angle of Repose (1971) and the National Book Award for The Spectator Bird (1976). A long life, then (born 1909), and a long, productive and distinguished literary career.

The stories...