Lee K. Abbott is best known as a short-story writer who addresses the themes of lost love and family grief with an inventive voice and a deeply felt compassion for his naive, self-destructive characters. Abbott's stories tend to be comic, satiric, and earthy. Since the publication of his first collection of short stories, The Heart Never Fits Its Wanting, in the fall of 1980, Abbott has become an award-winning, highly respected writer.

Contemporary writers such as Richard Bausch who keep their own personalities and values invisible in their work may be influenced by the works of Jane Austen, Henry James, and Gustave Flaubert; Abbott is at the other end of the spectrum, because his narrative voice becomes a key element of his fiction, as in the narratives of Henry Fielding. Abbott's grand, maximalist style is sometimes compared to that of William Styron or John Barth. For his sensitivity to...