The Uses of Imagination

In any reasonably definable sense, the short story has existed as a literary form for less than a hundred years, and the significant differences among short stories are not historical differences but differences in mode, in the attitudes toward life which govern an author's sense of reality and the techniques of expression these attitudes dictate.

The best way to arrange a volume of short stories is by types or kinds rather than in a chronological pattern intended to indicate some not very significant historical development. The stories in each group require essentially the same kind of reading, and in the introductory essay for each group I have tried to suggest the kind of reading the stories require and why they do so.