The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy

Collected here for the first time are all James Purdy's short stories-fifty-three in number-including several previously unpublished works. Characterized by his dark sense of humor and jaundiced eye toward American culture, Purdy was considered one of the greatest-and most underappreciated-writers in America in the last half of the twentieth century. Championed by writers as diverse as Edward Albee, Lillian Hellman, Dorothy Parker, and Dame Edith Sitwell-who stated that Purdy would "come to be recognized as one of the greatest living writers of fiction in our language"-Purdy's vast body of work has heretofore been relegated to the avant-garde fringes of the American literary mainstream. He was marginalized all too often as a "gay author" with themes too scabrous for popular consumption, but American culture has finally caught up with the man Susan Sontag once called "one of the half dozen or so living American writers worth taking seriously."