Lawrence Pearsall Jacks was already a professor at Manchester College in Oxford and editor for several years of the prestigious Hibbert Journal when he began, at nearly age fifty, his career as a writer. From that date he wrote more than thirty books, about one-third of which are collections of short stories. His nonfiction works are predominantly on religious, social, and political themes, for he engaged many wide-ranging issues of his time. The bulk of his short fiction was composed during a four-year period before World War I and another brief period following the war. His stories mirror his general interest in the "common man," and he blends his vivid portrayals of these persons with broadly religious issues, both natural and supernatural, along with social commentary and a critique of academic pretensions. Almost all of his books were published on both sides of the Atlantic, and while, by...