Throughout these years, she wrote some poetry, committed herself to liberal causes, and found suburban domesticity less and less adequate. In 1948 she started writing seriously, first autobiographical family stories, then non-family stories. The first of these, "The Ginger Box," appeared in the
New Yorker in 1948, and in 1951 her first book, a collection of short stories, most of them previously printed, was published.
In the Absence of Angels is an impressive first volume. With it, her reputation as a short story writer of importance was established. The lead story, "In Greenwich There Are Many Gravelled Walks," is one of her very finest. It contains all the marks of her storyteller's talent: control, precision, finely honed prose, careful rhythms, and a near-perfect shape. As with all of Calisher's best short fiction, the stories are about real human beings responding to real dilemmas with real emotions. Peter, the competent son of a hopelessly alcoholic mother who must periodically be checked into a Greenwich sanitorium, meets Susan, the daughter of a thrice-married mother and an aging homosexual. They are introduced just moments before the father's latest young man jumps from a fifth-story window.
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