SOURCE: Introduction to Unlucky for Pringle: Unpublished and Other Stories, Vision Press, 1973, pp. 7-17.

In the following introduction to a collection of Lewis's short fiction, Fox and Chapman provide an overview of Lewis's work in the genre and touch on some major elements that mark his short stories, including their peculiar sense of dark comedy; rootedness in the politics and culture of the day; unsympathetic portrayal of women; interest in violence; and recurrence of the figure of the Impostor.

Recalling the early stages of his career, Wyndham Lewis wrote in 1935 that "The short story, as we call it, was the first literary form with which I became familiar . . . The 'short story' was the crystallization of what I had to keep out of my consciousness while painting."¹ The latter part of this statement would seem to relegate Lewis's short fiction to a disproportionately secondary place in his œuvre. For...