Welcome to the City and Other Stories explained

Welcome to the City and Other Stories
Author:Irwin Shaw
Country:United States
Language:English
Publisher:Random House
Release Date:1942
Media Type:Print (hardback)
Pages:269
Oclc:1930658

Welcome to the City and Other Stories is a collection of short fiction by Irwin Shaw published by Random House in 1942.[1]

Stories

Reception

Biographer Michael Shnayerson reports that the collection was "overwhelmingly" acclaimed by critics when it first appeared confirming Shaw's reputation as an outstanding American writer.[2]

New York Herald Tribune reviewer H. N. Doughty praised the "warmth of feeling, the heart, the humanity" that characterized the stories in the volume.[3]

Though acknowledging Shaw's "rich understanding and superb technique," Time magazine cautioned that he "lays it on too thick or too pat…Tricks of overemphasis, which get by on stage, look as uneasy in print as theatrical makeup does in a living room."[4]

Theme

By the mid-1930s, Shaw's short fiction was appearing frequently in the major literary journals of the day, among these Esquire, Collier's, Harper's and The New Yorker: "By 1948, he had contributed so regularly to the latter that he was regarded as one of the most prominent of a group known as The New Yorker writers."[5]

The stories in Shaw's first two collections of fiction focus on the working class who suffered in the aftermath of the Panic of 1929 and the devastating effects of the Great Depression.[6]

Shaw's themes in Welcome to the City are largely those of the political Left in the United States at this time—identifying capitalism as a system destructive and degrading to the masses, and sympathetic to socialism. The stories, however, do not emerge as overt propaganda, but as literary art.[7] Giles adds that the title of Shaws' second volume of short fiction makes this explicit, and remained so until 1951, when Shaw became as an expatriate in Paris for the next 25 years.[8]

Sources

Notes and References

  1. Giles, 1983 p. 188: Selected Bibliography, Primary Sources.
    Giles, 1991 p. 223: Selected Bibliography
  2. Shnayerson, 1989 p. 116: "...Shaw treated very much as one of America's best writers…overwhelmingly favorable" response.
  3. Shnayerson, 1989 p. 117: NYHT, January 23, 1942. See Sources, p. 217
  4. Shnayerson, 1989 p. 117
  5. Giles, 1983 p. 31: "For more than a decade before his first novel, The Young Lions, appeared in 1948...Shaw had steadily been building his reputation as a master of the short story."
  6. Giles, 1983 p. 45
  7. Giles, 1983 p. 45: Giles defines the stories "as art, rather than straight propaganda."
  8. Giles, 1983 p. 73, And Chronology (no page numbers provided in chronology)

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