In the following excerpt, Mitchell surveys the major themes of Ross's short fiction.

In the following essay, Bishop traces the metaphor of the horse in Ross's childhood stories, maintaining that the image of the horse "becomes the enspiriting essence of the imagination. "

In the following essay, Carpenter offers an overview of the critical reaction to Ross's short fiction and notes the comic elements in eight of his stories.

In the following essay, Chambers explores the pervasive sense of isolation, claustrophobia, and cramped imagination found in Ross's short fiction, particularly "A Field of Wheat, " "Cornet at Night, " and "The Painted Door. "

A number of the stories [in The Lamp At Noon and Other Stories] are narrated from the viewpoint of a young boy between the ages of ten and fifteen. While he seldom felt inclined to use a distinctive idiom or dialect, such as Twain adopted for Huck Finn, Ross nonetheless wanted this youthful narrative voice to seem fresh and natural. He was also aware, from his own experience, that prairie farm boys in the 1930s entered early into the world of adult responsibility. The grim facts of the Depression required a...

In the following essay, Djwa determines the quintessential Canadian nature of Ross's short fiction.

In the following essay, McMullen provides a stylistic and thematic analysis of Ross's short fiction.

Laurence was a Canadian novelist, short story writer, essayist, memoirist, editor, and translator. She is considered a prominent figure in contemporary Canadian literature. In the essay, she acknowledges Ross as an early influence upon her work and describes his style as "spare, lean, and honest. "

Horizon, the town that is the setting for [As For Me and My House], could be any place on the prairie in the thirties; yet again, it can be anywhere at any time. It is bleak, it is tired, it is horribly true; and yet there is an element of the flower blooming on the desert, and the flying of feeling that transcends all, that gives to As For Me and My House a prominent position in Canadian letters. This is a novel which, despite its Puritanism, its grimness, its dustiness, gives to the reader many of the ele...

In the following essay, Whitman contends that the little girl in Ross's "One's a Heifer" is an imaginary construct of Vickers's "schizoid personality."

The futile cycle of eking existence from an indifferent world predominates [The Lamp at Noon and Other Stories]—a kind of rural Dubliners in which the same adult impotence replaces a similar childish Araby. Overall, the book spawns variations on the theme of isolation and its haunting melody is unmistakable. The storm which creeps into Will's house [in "Not by Rain Alone"], killing his wife but undoubtedly allowing the child to relive the same empty cycle as its parents, also inv...

The bleak assumption of this beautiful novel [As For Me And My House] is that Philip Bentley has no ground whatsoever upon which he might stand, no communion at all through which he might discover saving dimensions of self. The overwhelming desolation which rims Horizon around—the hostile wind, the suffocating dust and sand and the even more suffocating and claustrophobic heat—recurs on the pages of Mrs. Bentley's diary as outward manifestation of the inner desolation felt by her husban...