[One must be grateful] that at last there is an available anthology of Buckler's stories. What they reveal collectively is that Buckler's gifts as a fiction writer are by no means restricted to his novels. Indeed, stories like "Penny in the Dust", "The Quarrel", or "The Dream and the Triumph" are equal to the very best in Buckler's longer works. Though [The Rebellion of Young David and Other Stories] confirms the impression one has from the novels that Buckler's narrative technique is limited to the conventional and that his themes and plot motifs are limited in their variety, the stories also confirm that at his best Buckler is a writer with a superlative degree of skill, perceptiveness, emotional power, and control, and a writer whose themes are the compelling universals of the inherent conflicts between past and present, city and country, family and outsider, man and woman, age and youth, and society and the individual. (p. 387)