In the Zoo | Literary Criticism & Book Review

In the Zoo Critical Overview

Critical reactions to Stafford's writings have been largely favorable, although Stafford's novels have been criticized for their lack of distance from autobiographical material and their tendency to be overwritten. Joyce Carol Oates applies this criticism to Stafford's short stories in her 1979 essay "The Interior Castle: The Art of Jean Stafford's Short Fiction," in which she wrote, "Some of the stories, it must be admitted, are marred by an arch, over-written self-consciousness, too elaborate, too artificial, to have arisen naturally from the fable at hand." However, Stafford's short stories from the mid-1950s were generally reviewed very positively, and The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford won a Pulitzer Prize in 1970. "In the Zoo" won the O. Henry Memorial Award for best short story of the year in 1955, and Oates cites its climax as a brilliant moment from one of Stafford's finest "[s]ubdued and analytical and beautifully-constructed" stories.