About the Author:
Quite apart from his brilliant and innovative career as a theater director and, even earlier, as a striking and sensitive young actor, Granville Barker is known as an important (and, indeed major) writer of Shakespeare criticism. The theatergoing public remembers him as one of the chief and most important British playwrights of the twentieth century: of his forteen plays at least half, by anyone's measure, are major theater pieces. This present volume represents yet another aspect of his literary achievement.

This book rescues from oblivion the seven known short stories of Harley Granville Barker and demonstrates the sometimes very close relationship between individual stories and one or another of Barker's plays written about the same time. Quite apart, however, from these considerations of the connections between his works in prose fiction and his dramatic pieces, the book seeks to examine the merits of the stories in their own right and to compare them with the work of other short-story writers of the same period, including Galsworthy, Lawrence, and Munro. Though his output in this genre was small, Barker is not dwarfed in this scintillating company.

The FDU Press has particular strengths in literary studies, world history and politics, biography, film, ethnic studies, sociology, the Civil War, art, religion, local history, and urban studies.