In the following essay, Kinzie explores the defining characteristics of Millhauser's short fiction and finds parallels between his work and that of Jorge Luis Borges and Franz Kafka.

In the following essay, Saltzman analyzes the role of lists in Millhauser's fiction.

In the following essay, Fowler praises Millhauser as a miniaturist, claiming that this role sets the author apart from other contemporary writers and allows him to create “exquisite, apolitical, socially indifferent” tales.

In the following excerpt, Green finds parallels between Steve Stern's A Plague of Dreamers and Millhauser's Little Kingdoms.

In the following essay, Howe offers a close reading of Millhauser's Catalogue of the Exhibition.

In the following review of Little Kingdoms, Dirda addresses Millhauser's reputation as a writer of meticulous tales.

In the following review, Dirda maintains that “like many readers, I find Steven Millhauser irresistible, even while recognizing, grudgingly, that for others the stories in The Barnum Museum may possess an artificiality that makes them seem abstract or even lifeless.”

In the following mixed review of The Barnum Museum, Saroyan praises the wit and imagination of the stories in the collection, but contends that Millhauser tries too hard to emulate the style of such postmodern writers as Donald Barthelme.

In the following essay, Eder asserts that the stories of In the Penny Arcade “all suffer to varying degrees from overarrangement and an evident striving for effect.”

Steven Millhauser's first novel, "Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer, 1943–1954, by Jeffrey Cartwright," is probably the best Nabokovian novel not written by the master himself…. As it turns out, the back-and-forths through which the biographer invents his author and the author his biographer stir the mind and agitate the emotions as unexpectedly as do the ins and outs through which nature and art invent each other in Nabokov—through which, fo...

William Faulkner argued that the problems of children were not worth writing about. He wrote frequently about children himself, but he treated their lives as windows on the adult world, or as early parallels to mature venality, obsession, or tragedy. Similarly, he placed high value on [J. D. Salinger's] The Catcher In The Rye, mainly because the odyssey of Holden Caulfield was such an earnest and telling rebuke to contemporary morality…. [Portrait of a Romantic] is a rebuke to Faulkner'...

Millhauser's first novel received wide critical attention and excellent reviews but few readers. (Although those readers tend to grapple him to their soul with hoops of steel.) If these facts mean anything, they probably mean not that Millhauser is a coterie writer but that he is less confusable with other writers…. We tend not to like new things; for this reason our first question about a novelty is likely to be "what's it like?" If it is like nothing we know, we shy away...

In the following review, LaHood elucidates the disparity between Millhauser's short stories and realistic fiction.

Little could James Joyce have foreseen the avalanche of cliché he was setting in motion when he began A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man with [a] now legendary sentence…. In thousands of first novels since Joyce's revolutionary use of the baby artist's earliest lisping literacies half a century ago, a precocious horde of sensitive, rebellious, grimly ambitious children—every last one of them wise and gifted beyond his tender years—have marched to the same leitm...

In Millhauser's Portrait Of A Romantic, 29-year-old Arthur Grumm sits down to reminisce about his youth. The story thus has a limitation placed upon it that is as provocative as it is claustrophobic. We can only suppose what has become of the mature Arthur by imagining the potential of his vision of himself as a pubescent in suburban New York. This is not as irksome as it might seem, however, if it is recalled that Millhauser's well-received first novel, Edwin Mullhouse (1972), pretended to be...

Let me make one thing perfectly clear: [Edwin Mullhouse] is a novel…. Let me add one more thing. Steven Millhauser, who is the only begetter of Cartwright, Mullhouse, Cartwright's biography, and Millhauser's novel, is a dazzlingly successful writer. He is also a precocious imitator of Vladimir Nabokov, as he graciously acknowledges by characterizing Cartwright as a biographer who lives next to his subject; who, more or less accidentally, becomes involved in his subject's death; w...

Like great actors in mediocre plays, there are some writers whose talent seems larger than the vehicles they have chosen to contain it. A case in point is [Edwin Mullhouse], a remarkably well-written and sometimes funny account of the hitherto unrecognized genius Edwin Mullhouse…. [The] narrative takes us from Edwin's first gurgles to his creative Later Years and, as such, is a devilish satire on those exhaustive biographies that weigh down shelves with their bulky worthiness and unrelieved te...

["Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer (1943–1954). By Jeffrey Cartwright"], Steven Millhauser's deft first novel,… offers a substantial amount of truth disguised as elegant artifice…. Stop for a moment and consider the child as artist. In a sense every child is an artist. Just as the intricately-contrived private lunacies of madmen are at heart one with the creative act, so too, the uninhibited crayon scrawls of an infant are the joyously self-...

In the following review, Malin offers a positive assessment of The Barnum Museum.

In the following excerpt, Davis provides a favorable review of Millhauser's novella The Little Kingdom of J. Franklin Payne.

Portrait of a Romantic is about 30,000 words too long, and most of them are adjectives; massed battalions of them, lovingly marshalled in pages of relentlessly detailed description for what is, at a second glance, a disarmingly slight tale. The romantic in question is the prosaically named Arthur Grumm and the novel concerns itself with the first year or so of his adolescence and his relationships with three friends in an anonymous American suburb some time—I would guess—in the 1950s. The frie...

In the following review, Evenson offers a mixed assessment of Enchanted Night.

There is something very disconcerting and peculiar about Steven Millhauser's fiction. It is written with the discipline of a man far beyond his thirty-four years. Millhauser is a novelist of decided yet disquieting talent, a prisoner of his own acute intelligence and self-consciousness. A young man who knows too much, Millhauser has to learn to relax when he writes…. [Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer, 1943–1954, by Jeffrey Cartwright] was a debut of striking inv...

Edwin Mullhouse was a Connecticut boy who wrote the novel Cartoons and who died under strange circumstances at age 11; Jeffrey Cartwright, his neighbor, classmate and friend, wrote this biography a year later. That's Steven Millhauser's donnee, as Henry James would say; that's what we readers must accept [in Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer (1943–1954) by Jeffrey Cartwright] with a willing suspension of our disbelief. Believe it or not, it's well w...

Steven Millhauser, it seems to me, is attempting to do several things with his novel ["Edwin Mullhouse"]. First, and perhaps basically, he is writing a subtle satire on all of those biographies, which we occasionally find ourselves reading, that deal with the lives of people we never heard of when they were alive, and probably would not have cared much about if we did. You know the type. Ponderous details abound, regardless…. Unfortunately, there is such a thing as doing a job too well....