Reviewers and literary critics associated the stories in "Rock Springs" with the aesthetic style known as "dirty realism". This term referred to a group of authors during the 1970s and 1980s that included Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff—- two writers with whom Ford was well acquainted—- along with Ann Beattie, Frederick Barthelme, Larry Brown, and Jayne Anne Phillips, among others. Those applying this label refer to Carver's lower-middle-class subjects or the protagonists Ford portrays in "Rock Springs". However, many of the characters of the novels about Frank Bascombe ("The Sportswriter", "Independence Day", "The Lay of the Land", and "Let Me Be Frank With You"), notably the protagonist himself, enjoy degrees of material affluence and cultural capital not normally associated with dirty realism.