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.

With works by Henry James, Stephen Crane, John Cheever, James Joyce and many others, this outstanding collection of 35 American and British short pieces of fiction from the first half of the 20th century is one of the bestselling collections of our time.

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.

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