SOURCE: "Jean Stafford's Human Zoo," in The New Republic, Vol. 151, No. 18, October 31, 1964, pp. 22-3.

In the following review of Bad Characters, Tracy calls Stafford a "brilliant writer" but finds some of the stories in the volume too contrived.

There was a day when story-tellers could be roughly divided into two species, the writers and the confectioners. The distinction often was one of purpose rather than of talent. Confectioners could write as well as or better than their serious colleagues: it was merely that they wrote to order or with a cool eye for the public taste, a cat that invariably slips out of the bag as time goes by. And some real writers happened to triumph, for the wrong reasons, in the confectionery market as well: whatever highbrow may disparage Mr. P. G. Wodehouse, for example, it is unlikely to be a fellow craftsman, and along with the...