Although Caroline Gordon was far more productive as a novelist than as a short-story writer (she published nine novels and two story collections--not including her Collected Stories [1981]--plus a smattering of other stories), her critical reputation now rests, with the exception of a novel or two, primarily on her stories. Ironically, she saw herself first as a novelist and only secondarily as a short-story writer; stories, she frequently complained, were minor achievements, distractions from her more important, long projects. "I wasn't cut out to write short stories," she said in a 1971 interview, and to Josephine Herbst she wrote (6 October 1929) that she loathed stories, adding that "they are all just a trick, and they simply drive me mad." After completing in 1937 "The Brilliant Leaves," one of her most accomplished stories (Harper's Bazaar, November 1937; collected in The Forest of the South, 1945), she told Robert Penn Warren that she was through...