More stories to remember [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION The first reason for issuing More Stories to Remember is that the originál two volumes had an astonishingly successful acceptance, which is always a pleasant thing for all concerned, for the publishers, for the authors whose work has been used, and for the hard-working editors who selected and as-sembled the contents. A still more valid reason is that a most gratifying number of people who read Stories to Remember have expressed a desire for more. In the course of a review of the first volumes, one critic declared, "What we have here is extended proof that entertaining writing can alsó be dis-tinguished writing." This phrase summed up clearly and succinctly the pur-pose with which we had begun. We quote it here because our objective remains the same: to offer only stories which can be read with pleasure and which at the same time bear the hallmark of masterly technique. It follows that the names which make up our new contents page are most exceptional names. We are proud to present such a list, particularly as we may honestly assure our readers that they will encounter these masters of storytelling in the most beguiling of moods. Sometimes there is little to be told about the genesis of a great story or növel. It is written with much labor and absorption in the seclusion of the author's study and later is published with the customary rites; and, if it de-serves a long life and a sustained popularity, it achieves both without owing anything to attendant circumstances. However, in the essential scrutiny of pedigrees, which is part of the task of compiling anthologies, it has de-veloped that circumstances most interesting in themselves surrounded the launching of somé of our selections. In teliing of these briefly we wish to make it clear that we are not expressing thereby any preference for them over the equally great stories offered without such reference. In fact, most of the others stand up ruggedly against the horizon of time on the foundations of long acceptance. Somé few, moreover, are in a sense "discoveries," and in not speaking of them in advance we are allowing our readers to experience the same pleasure we felt in first reading them. It is seldom that an author takes the whole public completely and spon-taneously by storm with his first work. This happened in 1836 when a very young man named Charles Dickens, an exuberantly gifted young man who had been acting as a shorthand reporter in the House of Commons and