Miss West is a writer of extraordinary vitality. Her work … is sharp, direct and affirmative. The smallest of her stories [in "Love, Death and the Ladies' Drill Teams"] has about it a kind of sizableness the longest novel lacks unless it looks straight at life as Miss West does. Death, poverty and evil are here,… and she neither prettifies nor moans about them. She simply understands and relates, and while she makes her own sympathies clear, she unfailingly respects the integrity of the people she has brought into being. No cardboard villains, no caricatures.

It's just possible that, strong as the stories are, each of them with its own degree of suspense, she works with a quietness that makes for no immediate stir in the market place. Her style is not unmistakably individual, as, say, Mr. [William] Faulkner's or Mr. [Ernest] Hemingway's or Miss [Eudora] Welty's is. But...