Sherwood Anderson’s short fiction is a flirt between ordinary American life and the private weirdness running beneath it.

These stories, originally gathered in The Triumph of the Egg in 1921, turn repeatedly toward people who find themselves slightly out of joint with the worlds they inhabit. The lonely young women, disappointed men, marriages under pressure, small-town lives interrupted by desire, ambition or some sudden recognition that refuses to fit neatly back into place.

Anderson’s style helped shift American fiction away from plot-heavy storytelling toward something looser and more psychological, built from voice, mood, gesture and the half-articulated interior lives of otherwise unremarkable people. The result can feel almost modernist in miniature, this work becomes an economical introduction to the writer whose work would strongly influence Hemingway, Faulkner and the American short story that followed.

Dover Publications, Mineola, New York, 2000. Dover Thrift Edition; first published in this edition 2000. Paperback. Light shelf wear to covers; internally clean and sound.