The Collected Stories of Gladys Schmitt

Novelist Gladys Schmitt (1909-1972) published many stories in popular magazines. They are collected here for the first time. Gladys's short fiction, like her novels, address wide swaths of the reading public, and yet they reflect many of the experimental impulses of literary modernism. Most of these stories end in what James Joyce called epiphanies; they concern protagonists who awaken from misjudgments of the social meaning and emotional tone of the situations and events in their lives. All bear Gladys's hallmark of a verbal texture of detail that presents both external realities and movements of mind. One measure of success for a storyteller is that details linger in a reader's mind, and by this measure Gladys was a master storyteller.

GLADYS SCHMITT was born in Pittsburgh in 1909. She was awarded a B.A. as well as an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from the University of Pittsburgh. Schmitt was the author of eleven novels, including David the King, Rembrandt, and The Godforgotten, which were translated into many languages and sold millions of copies. She was Thomas Stockham Baker Professor of Literature at Carnegie Mellon University, where she founded the Creative Writing Program and was a member of the faculty for thirty years. Among other honors, she was awarded Carnegie Mellon’s Ryan Award for Meritorious Teaching. She died on October 3, 1972.