Ross roots his fiction in a particular and vividly realized place and time--the Saskatchewan prairie of the 1930s. Setting is integral to theme and narrative. The beauty and violence of the landscape come alive through his writing, and the prairie becomes a region of the mind. His regionalism makes Ross an important figure in Canadian literature, while his thematic concerns--alienation and loneliness, the ever-presentness of the past, the artistic and imaginative struggle, the search for meaning in an incomprehensible universe--belong to the mainstream of twentieth-century writing.
Ross's stories, ten of which are collected in The Lamp at Noon and Other Stories (1968) and nine in The Race and Other Stories (1982), are among his most successful works. Most are set on the prairie of the 1930s during the drought and Depression. The stories focus on the effects of loneliness, hardship, and poverty on individuals and their relationships. Thus, while Ross portrays the harshness of the land vividly and realistically, his focus is on inner rather than outer landscape. As Margaret Laurence wrote in her introduction to the first edition of The Lamp at Noon and Other Stories, "the outer situation always mirrors the inner.
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