This book is in part a reflection of the changing characterof American magazines, which once provided a rich marketfor the writer of short stories. Today, the number of magazines that publish serious short stories is sadly diminished.Partly for this reason, The New Yodvers domination of thefield is now virtually uncontested, and its influence has become unimaginably wide. The New Yorker has been sofrequently and so exceively criticized in recent years forallegedly imposing stereotypes on the work of gifted youngwriters that we must in fairness ask: How much poorerwould the American short story be today without The NewYorker, which for more than a generation has set our standards?

50 Great Short Stories is a comprehensive selection from the world’s finest short fiction. The authors represented range from Hawthorne, Maupassant, and Poe, through Henry James, Conrad, Aldous Huxley, and James Joyce, to Hemingway, Katherine Anne Porter, Faulkner, E.B. White, Saroyan, and O’Connor. The variety in style and subject is enormous, but all these stories have one point in common–the enduring quality of the writing, which places them among the masterpieces of the world’s fiction.