Irwin Shaw is one of the most frequently anthologized twentieth-century American short-story writers. Over the years, such Shaw stories as "The Girls in Their Summer Dresses", "The Eighty-Yard Run", "Act of Faith", and "Main Currents of American Thought" have become staples of American short-story collections. Two of his World War II stories were O. Henry Memorial Award winners--"Walking Wounded" received the 1944 first prize, and the next year "Gunner's Passage" received the second prize. In a career that spanned almost half a century, Shaw published over eighty short stories; and the consistently high quality and thematic diversity of his work became especially evident in 1978, when sixty-three of his best were published in his Short Stories: Five Decades. While his initial recognition came in the 1930s as a proletariat protest writer, his best short fiction is in the tradition of existential modernism. He utilized the Jamesian "scenic" method and...