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“... Willa Cather is one of those American writers whose fictional accomplishments were both applauded and judged harshly when she was alive. Now, forty years after her death, they are the subject of increasing critical interest. In her lifetime she was praised by H.L. Mencken, Sinclair Lewis, Louise Bogan, but Edmund Wilson said that One of Ours,* her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, was a complete failure and that My Antonia ended on the level of a Ladies Home Journal serial ...”

“... that have attended her writing of historical fiction. When her 70th birthday hit her, Doris Grumbach grimly began Coming into the End Zone. Seventy is a threatening age: three score years and ten. We may try to disregard our decades, believing our lives are divided into seven-year periods: but we are caught both ways by 70. It is, in the cant ...”

“... Balls. A much more subtle treatment of a similar theme is offered in The Magician’s Girl by Doris Grumbach. This also follows a group of women, three this time, and also uses a university – Barnard College in New York – as the place where their disparate lives are knotted together, briefly but with lasting effect. The flavour of bygone New York ...”

“... has a tact sensitive to its need for privacy. Questions of privacy and self are also central to Doris Grumbach’s The Missing Person – a defiantly nice achievement, in that it deals in a sophisticated, literary way with a subject ill-accommodated to such a treatment: Hollywood. Hollywood certainly spawned its own self-observing, self-absorbed genre ...”

“... don’t like us filthy bums.’ Poor Rudy replies: ‘You ain’t filthy. You got a new suit.’ Doris Grumbach, Joseph Heller and Alison Lurie have all praised this Albany novel, the two ladies admiring its ‘low comedy’ and its ‘rollicking, black wit’. Fair enough, I suppose: but I did not laugh much myself. The story is too rough and too ...”