Short Story Masterpieces Book

As this was published in 1954, I knew going into it that it would pretty much be dominated by white men. In the end I counted 8 out of 36 stories by women, and I'm fairly certain every author included was white (some of the authors I was unfamiliar with, but I would highly doubt I'm wrong in this). Now. Most of the stories included here were written fairly early in the last century, and so none of this was a surprise. It doesn't lessen any of the stories, but I do feel that the subject matter and tone of the stories fell into just a few narrow categories, and it was disappointing that these few styles were apparently all that constituted "masterpieces" in the eyes of readers in the 50s. There were some gritty Westerns about becoming a Man on the frontier. There were tales of ennui and bitter marriages, and subsequent divorces. There were tales about African colonialism dripping with unveiled racism. And there were tales about boys with Mommy complexes. And that was pretty much it.

There were some really worth while things here. But the bulk of the collection, in my eyes, has not stood up well to time. My favorites were the Cheever, the Faulkner, the D.H. Lawrence, the Welty, and, oddly enough, the Salinger (I've never been a big Salinger fan, but the story included stuck me for some reason). It's a good choice to get an overview of early 20th century literature, but thankfully these stories are no longer representative of the whole of worthy literature.