Christopher Tilghman's collections of short stories, In a Father's Place (1990) and The Way People Run (1999), have been praised for mature character voices, detailed settings, and precisely crafted plots that guide his characters toward life-affirming epiphanies. Family history and geographic location provide the common ground for many of his stories. Insisting on "event and consequence and people" as the essential elements of storytelling, Tilghman has written stories that have led reviewers to compare him to Flannery O'Connor, William Faulkner, John Cheever, Ernest Hemingway, and Anton Chekhov.

Even as a child Tilghman was interested in writing, an interest fostered perhaps by his father, who was an executive at Houghton Mifflin. Born in Boston, Christopher Tilghman attended St. Paul's preparatory school and spent summers at a farm in Maryland that his family had owned since the seventeenth century. Tilghman dabbled in writing throughout his school years; yet, when he entered Yale...