The triumph of the egg and other stories

Malcolm Cowley called Sherwood Anderson "the only storyteller of his generation who left a mark on the style and vision of the generation that followed....Hemingway, Faulkner, Wolfe, Steinbeck...each owes an unmistakable debt to Anderson". This collection of stories -- much praised upon its hardcover publication in 1992 -- offers the best of Anderson's mature work.
Anderson profoundly changed the American short story, transforming it from light, popular entertainment into literature of the highest quality. His art belonged as much to an oral as a written tradition, and, as this collection shows, the best of his stories echo the language and the pace of a man talking to his friends. They explore with penetrating compassion the isolation of the individual and capture the emotional undercurrents hidden beneath ordinary events.