Customer Reviews

Great American Short Stories (Dover Thrift Editions)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
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1 star:		(0)

 

 

For some reason, neither Amazon nor Dover list the actual stories contained in this attractive collection here on Amazon. They include:

1 Nathaniel Hawthorne: Young Goodman Brown (1835)
2 Edgar Allan Poe: The Tell-Tale Heart (1843)
3 Herman Melville: Bartleby (1856)
4 Bret Harte: The Luck of Roaring Camp (1870)
5 Stephen Crane: The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky (1878)
6 Mark Twain: The Private History of a Campaign that Failed (1885)
7 Sarah Orne Jewett: A White Heron (1886)
8 Charles Waddell Chesnutt: The Goophered Grapevine (1887)
9 Mary E. Wilkins Freeman: A New England Nun (1891)
10 Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Yellow Wallpaper (1892)
11 Henry James: The Real Thing (1893)
12 Kate Chopin: A Pair of Silk Stockings (1897)
13 Jack London: To Build a Fire (1908)
14 Ambrose Bierce: An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (1909)
15 Theodore Dreiser: The Lost Phoebe (1916)
16 Willa Cather: Paul's Case (1920)
17 F. Scott Fitzgerald: Bernice Bobs Her Hair (1920)
18 Sherwood Anderson: The Egg (1921)
19 Ernest Hemingway: The Killers (1927)

All together this sampling includes some of the very best American short stories in the late 1800s and the first 30 years of the 1900s. Negri and Dover have done a great job of putting this little volume together.

Robert C. Ross 2010

This volume is great. It includes some 20 short stories from a variety of masters. Hemingway, Poe, and Henry James are but a handful represented. Luckily the modest price means we can all enjoy to own this volume.

Most of us were introduced to many of these fine authors in high school or college. Unfortunately we did not read them very carefully, we were too harried, more interested in a grade than in securing an education.

So fine, water over the dam. Now, we can read them for pleasure, enjoy the elegant prose, learn from the insight provided into the human condition, etc. Classics should be read several times in our lifetime. The good ones always provide us with pleasant, revealing and useful surprises.

Short and to the point this collection is a joy to read. The important thing is that they should be read (or reread) and then we should take time to think about what the author has revealed. What was the author telling us? How does it relate to our own lives, to the particular stage we are going through?

Read a story a day, think about it; it will add richness to your life.

I read a lot of short stories. Many today I find full of sadness and somber mood. It is a pleasure to read some stories that have stood the test of time. Great book for the train or vacation. Very satisfying read.

I am using this book in a study discussion group. It is fascinating to see how much discussion is prompted by the material in the stories in this collection. Each story seems to illuminate a special time or event in our history, and yet we can make connections to our present moment, realizing the commonality of certain feelings and reactions.

Fine works from the masters, what alse can I say
an outstanding collection of works.

This is actually a very good book to have. It was bought for a class in English Literature, but it has some good stories in it. I would be willing to read some of the non-assigned stories from this book. Best part- its a small book.