Shop H.E. Bates Online
- ID
- c164
- Title
- 'Foreword' [to Pick of To-day's Short Stories 7]
- Genre
- Essay
- Page Count
- 5
- Word Count
- 1200
- Publication Year
- 1956
- Document Types
- Full-text Online
- Literary Criticism
- Introductions, Forewards & Prefaces
- Topics
- Short Story
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).
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