An extraordinary collection which reminds us how great a talent Dreiser was."He has no peer in the American short story....Among the moderns, there is almost no one capable of writing tales like these." -Howard Fast.

Five powerful stories: "Free," the story of a man trying, as his wife lies dying, to understand why he never found happiness in marriage plus "The Second Choice," "Married," "Nigger Jeff," and "The Lost Phœbe."

Khat / Free / St. Columbia and the river / MeEwen of the shinig slave makers / The shadow / A Doer of the word / Nigger Jeff / The old neighborhood / Phantom Gold / My brother Paul / The lost Phoebe / Convention / Marriage--for one / The Prince who was a thief.

Doctor Storm looked at Mr. Haymaker as though he were very sorry for him—an old man long accustomed to his wife’s ways and likely to be made very unhappy by her untimely end; whereas Mr. Haymaker, though staring in an almost sculptural way, was really thinking what a farce it all was, what a dull mixture of error and illusion on the part of all. Here he was, sixty years of age, weary of all this, of life really—a man who had never been really happy in all the time that he had been married; and yet here was his wife, who from conventional reasons believed that he was or should be, and who on account of this was serenely happy herself, or nearly so. And this doctor, who imagined that he was old and weak and therefore in need of this loving woman’s care and sympathy and understanding! Unconsciously he raised a deprecating hand....FROM THE BOOKS.

Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time 'American writing, before and after Dreiser's time, differed almost as much as biology before and after Darwin,' said H. L. Mencken. Sister Carrie, Dreiser's great first novel, transformed the conventional 'fallen woman' story into a bold and truly innovative piece of fiction when it appeared in 1900. Naïve young Caroline Meeber, a small-town girl seduced by the lure of the modern city, becomes the mistress of a traveling salesman and then of a saloon manager, who elopes with her to New York. Both its subject matter and Dreiser's unsparing, nonjudgmental approach made Sister Carrie a controversial book in its time, and the work retains the power to shock readers today. 'Sister Carrie came to housebound and airless America like a great free Western wind, and to our stuffy domesticity gave us the first fresh air since Mark Twain and Whitman,' noted Sinclair Lewis. 'Dreiser enlarged, willy-nilly, by a kind of historical accident if you will, the range of American literature,' observed Robert Penn Warren. '[Sister Carrie] is a vivid and absorbing work of art.'

Featuring 30 of the greatest short stories from the most distinguished writers in the American short-story tradition, this new anthology begins with Washington Irving's tale "Rip Van Winkle" and ranges across more than one hundred years of storytelling, concluding with F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic, "Winter Dreams." Other selections include Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher," Melville's "Bartleby, The Scrivener," Harte's "The Luck of Roaring Camp," "To Build a Fire," by Jack London, "The Middle Years" by Henry James, plus stories by Mark Twain, Sarah Orne Jewett, Charles Chesnutt, Kate Chopin, Stephen Crane, Willa Cather, Ambrose Bierce, Theodore Dreiser, and others. Perfect for classroom use, this outstanding collection of short stories will also prove popular with fiction readers everywhere.

Regarded as one of Dreiser's best novels, Jennie Gerhardt is here recaptured as it was originally written, restoring it to its complete, unexpurgated form.

Features 19 gems in the American short-story tradition, including "The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allan Poe, "Bartleby" by Herman Melville, "To Build a Fire" by Jack London, plus stories by Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Hawthorne, Twain, others.