Walter de la Mare, Short Stories 1927-1956

Graham Greene, a long-standing admirer of Walter de la Mare, once produced a list of his seventeen favourite de la Mare short stories as '...one man's choice of what he could not, under any circumstances, spare...prose unequalled in its richness since the death of James, or, dare one say...Robert Louis Stevenson.' For many people Walter de la Mare (1873-1956) is as great a writer of fiction as of poetry. W.H. Auden, who used to read de la Mare stories to his niece as well as compiling a Choice of de la Mare's Verse, would have been one of them. But the majority of his short stories, of which there are a hundred, have long been unavailable. Short Stories brings them all together in three volumes in the first comprehensive collection to be published. De la Mare's earliest published works were stories, and he continued writing and re-writing stories throughout the rest of his life. There was always a creative counterpoint between the themes and imagery of his prose and his poetry -- such as the dream, childhood, the house, night, love lost and love regained, solitude and the traveller. A full understanding of either is impossible without knowledge of both. The stories also have a special concern with psychology, personal relationships, perception, alienation, the absurd and the supernatural. He began bringing out collections of stories when he published The Riddle and Other Stories in 1923. The second volume, Short Stories 1927-1956, starts with On the Edge of 1930, with its eight stories, and continues with two other adult collections, The Wind Blows Over of 1936 with eleven stories and A Beginning and Other Stories of 1955 with thirteen; and it also includes four uncollected stories and four unpublished stories. The publication of Short Stories is a literary event of major significance.