SOURCE: An introduction to The Penguin Henry Lawson: Short Stories, edited by John Barnes, Penguin Books, 1986, pp. 1-16.

In the excerpt below, Barnes traces the evolution of Lawson criticism and provides a laudatory assessment of his achievement as a short story writer.

Story-telling is an ancient art, but the idea of the short story as a distinct literary form is comparatively recent. Today the term 'short story' covers a range of possibilities, and we are less likely than the readers of a century ago to regard the short story as the poor relation of the novel. There perhaps still lingers a suspicion that the fiction writer without a novel to his credit has, so to speak, failed to measure up to the real test of creativity, no matter how fine that writer's short fiction may impress us as being. And in our assessment of the achievements of a...