'Foreword' [to Pick of To-day's Short Stories 7]

Bates writes of his optimism in the 1930s, shared by Elizabeth Bowen, for the future of the short story and of factors leading instead to a decline in new story writers.

He attributes this to a more general "famine in writers of imagination," and distinguishes a "decade of writers too greatly given to genuflection, communism and general vituperation" with writers for whom "the short story is close to poetry — indeed, at its best, is poetry."

In Pick of To-day's Short Stories 7 (Edited by John Pudney, London: Putnam, 1956, pp. 9-13, attached).