Herrick's three collections of short stories written over a thirty-year period from 1895 to 1925 do not alter the reputation established for him by his seventeen novels and five novellas. He is considered a brilliant, minor realist who fused Theodore Dreiser's power of social observation and Henry James's talent for character psychology in a way that approached but never achieved an epic synthesis. While his short stories reflect debts to both branches of the American writer's "divided stream," they are for the most part too limited in scope and theme to allow the sweeping social vision of his longer work to come through.

Robert Welch Herrick was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the fourth child of William Augustus Herrick, a lawyer, and Harriet Peabody Emery Herrick, daughter of a Congregational minister. His family's Brahmin roots went back to the earliest settlers of New England. Educated at Harvard, where he served as...