SOURCE: "Jean Stafford's Triumph," in The New Criterion, Vol. 7, No. 3, November, 1988, pp. 61-72.

In this excerpt, Bawer places Stafford's short fiction in a genre he calls "New Yorker stories. "

Stafford continued to write short stories well into the mid-Sixties. Indeed, as her novels faded in the reading public's memory, she began to be known primarily for her work in that field, and, in particular, as one of the most celebrated practitioners of the controversial genre known as the New Yorker story. Stafford's short fiction, most of which was assembled in various volumes during the Fifties and Sixties and brought together in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Collected Stories (1969), represents one of the finest moments of the American short story. Witty, luminous, and impeccably crafted, her contributions to the genre are crowded with people named Otis and Meriwether and Fairweather, with troubled children and snobby society women, and with garden-party conversations...