In the following excerpt, Moestrup highlights some of the most significant stories written by Pirandello between 1910 and 1916, a period that the critic perceives as the middle phase of Pirandello's career as a short fiction writer.

Women as objects of desire, scorn, fear, as victims or as traps; conflicts arising over pregnancy and female identity—these lie at the very heart of Pirandello's dramatic plots. The triangular basis of a number of plays (old man-young woman-young man; husband-wife-lover) might place Pirandello squarely in the tradition of both classical and boulevard comedy were it not for the absence of, or at least the lack of emphasis on, romantic love. For Pirandello there can be no comic resolution, no a...

He appealed not because he flouted tradition but because his art mirrored, and put to discussion, the problems of his age. It is here that we have to see his importance; all other aspects of his work are secondary.

An educator and critic who specialized in the Romance languages, Starkie is best known for his tales of gypsy life, drawn from his own experiences living among them in Europe. In the following excerpt, he provides an overview of Pirandello's short fiction.

In the following essay, Schlueter examines the dual nature of Pirandello's characters in Henry IV, maintaining that the protagonist is the prototype for metaphysical characters in modern drama.

In the following essay, Vitti-Alexander maintains that a symbolic connection exists between Pirandello's characters and nature as it is depicted in his stories.

Below, Paolucci discusses the defining characteristics of Pirandello's drama, emphasizing the dramatist's concern with depicting the nature of personality and consciousness.

An American educator and critic, Radcliff-Umstead is the author and editor of numerous studies of Romance literature. In the following excerpt, he analyzes some of Pirandello's later short stories, to which the critic attributes a distinctly mythic quality.

In the essay below, Mariani examines how figures in Pirandello 's plays create their own "subjective realities. "

In the following excerpt, Di Paolo assesses Pirandello's characterizations of women in his short stories, finding them stereotypical and limited in variety.

Leo was a leading German scholar of Romance literature. In the following excerpt from an essay that was originally published in Romanistiches Jarbuch in 1963, he compares the short story "Mrs. Frola and Her Son-In-Law, Mr. Ponza" to its stage adaptation, Right You Are (If You Think So), while asserting that Pirandello's short fiction is more artistically powerful than his dramas.

Poggioli was an Italian-born American critic and translator. Much of his critical writing is concerned with Russian literature, including The Poets of Russia: 1890-1930 (1960), which is one of the most important examinations of that literary era. In the following excerpt, Poggioli discusses the Italian author Giovanni Verga as the literary progenitor of Pirandello.

An Italian-born American educator and critic specializing in Italian literature, Ragusa is the author of Narrative and Drama: Essays in Modern Italian Literature from Verga to Pasolini (1976) as well as book-length studies on Pirandello, Giovanni Verga, and Alessandro Manzoni. In this essay, she explicates Pirandello 's ghost story "Granella 's House " as a commentary on the limits of reason and science.

In the following essay, Rauhut analyses the structure, theme, and literary devices of Pirandello's story "The Rose. "

Esslin, a prominent and sometimes controversial critic of contemporary theater, is perhaps best known for coining the term "theater of the absurd. " His The Theater of the Absurd (1961) is a major study of the avant-garde drama of the 1950s and early 1960s, including the works of Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, and Jean Genet. In the following essay, he provides an overview of Pirandello's work, stressing his influence on modern theater.

In the following excerpt, Bentley characterizes Pirandello as a pessimist who speaks for the people "who have lived through the extraordinary vicissitudes of the twentieth century, uncomprehending passively suffering. "

In this excerpt, Radcliff-Umstead employs two examples, "The Journey" and "Happiness," to illustrate his assertion that Pirandello 's focus in his stories is "the failure or success of his fictional characters to reach an accord with life. "

In the following essay, Finch perceives in Pirandello's short fiction a tension between the spontaneity of life and the boundaries—both social and psychological—that humans impose upon themselves.

In the following excerpt from an essay written in 1958 as an introduction to the collection Short Stories, Keene perceives Pirandello's stories to be about the human condition.

In the following excerpt, Valesio closely examines the short story "Canta l'epistola."

MacCarthy was one of the foremost English literary and drama critics of the twentieth century. He served for many years on the staff of the New Statesman and edited the periodical Life and Letters. In the following favorable review of the Roman Art Theatre Company's stage production of Six. Characters in Search of an Author, he examines the work's major themes and terms it "a remarkable play. "

In the following excerpt, Chomel discusses Pirandello's treatment of the theme of time in several of his short stories.

A longtime editor of the leftist magazine Dissent and a regular contributor to The New Republic, Howe is one of America's most highly respected literary critics and social historians. He has been a socialist since the 1930s, and his criticism is frequently informed by a liberal social viewpoint. In this review of the 1959 collection Short Stories, Howe relates Pirandello's work to nineteenth-century realism.

In the following review, Hutchison judges the collection The Naked Truth "truly great, " asserting that Pirandello conveys the messages of his stories very subtly.

An American playwright, poet, and novelist, Young was a prominent member of the Agrarian group of Southern poets with Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, and several others, from 1928 until the mid-1950s. He served for twenty years as drama critic for such journals as the New York Times, and the best of this criticism is collected in Immortal Shadows: A Book of Dramatic Criticism (1948). He is especially acclaimed for his translations of Anton Chekhov's dramas. In the following review...

In the following review, Hart hails Better Think Twice about It as a testament to Pirandello's skill as a short story writer,

A highly respected American literary critic, Kazin is best known for his essay collections The Inmost Leaf (1955) and Contemporaries (1962), and particularly for On Native Grounds (1942), a study of American prose writing since the era of William Dean Howells. In the following review of The Medals, and Other Stories, he finds the stories for the most part tiresome.

In this review, Hutchison praises The Medals, and Other Stories, noting that Pirandello's work is distinct from that of other short fiction writers.

In the following review of Short Stories, Seldin identifies qualities that distinguish Pirandello's successful short fiction from his weaker stories.

In the following review, the critic extols the collection Better Think Twice about It.