Short Story Masterpieces

Short Story Masterpieces

35 Classic American and British Stories from the First Half of the 20th Century

Mass Market Paperback

About the Book

Since its first printing in 1954, this outstanding anthology has been the book of choice by teachers, students, and lovers of short fiction. Surveying stories by British and American writers in the first half of the twentieth century, editors Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine selected stories that broke new ground and challenged the imagination with their style, subject matter, or tone: the unforgettable, enduring works that shaped the literature of our time.

A truly exceptional collection of great stories, including:

The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky by Stephen Crane
The Horse Dealer’s Daughter by D. H. Lawrence
Barn Burning by William Faulkner
The Sojourner by Carson McCullers
The Open Window by Saki
Flowering Judas by Katherine Anne Porter
The Boarding House by James Joyce
Soldier’s Home by Ernest Hemingway
The Tree of Knowledge by Henry James
Why I Live at the P.O. by Eudora Welty

. . . and twenty-five more of the century’s best stories!
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About the Author

Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) was born in Illinois and began his career as a reporter before enlisting as an ambulance driver at the Italian front in World War I. Hemingway and his first (of four) wives lived in Paris in the 1920s, as part of the "Lost Generation" expatriate community, before moving to Key West, Florida, and later to Cuba. Known first for short stories, he sealed his literary reputation with his novels, including The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and The Old Man and the Sea. More by Ernest Hemingway
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About the Author

William Faulkner
William Faulkner, one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, was born in New Albany, Mississippi, on September 25, 1897. He published his first book, The Marble Faun, in 1924, but it is as a literary chronicler of life in the Deep South—particularly in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, the setting for several of his novels—that he is most highly regarded. In such novels as The Sound and the FuryAs I Lay DyingLight in August, and Absalom, Absalom! he explored the full range of post–Civil War Southern life, focusing both on the personal histories of his characters and on the moral uncertainties of an increasingly dissolute society. In combining the use of symbolism with a stream-of-consciousness technique, he created a new approach to fiction writing. In 1949 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. William Faulkner died in Byhalia, Mississippi, on July 6, 1962. More by William Faulkner
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About the Author

Robert Penn Warren
Robert Penn Warren taught English at Yale University and was the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and one for poetry, and of the National Book Award for poetry. He was the author, with Cleanth Brooks, of Understanding Fiction, and of the novels All the King’s Men, World Enough and Time, Band of Angels, and Flood, as well as many other works of fiction, poetry, and literary criticism. He died in 1989. More by Robert Penn Warren
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About the Author

Albert Erskine
Albert Erskine was a vice president and executive editor at Random House in New York. He was also on the staff of The Southern Review and was associated with the Louisiana State University Press. He died in 1993. More by Albert Erskine
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