For more than four decades R. V. Cassill has written short stories that place him squarely in the mainstream of American short fiction. For the most part his stories are not marked by formal experiment. Rather, as Vincent Stewart has noted in Survey of Contemporary Literature (revised edition, 1977), Cassill writes "well-made stories . . . about the normal people who occupy the broad middle class of American life, people who would under ordinary conditions not be remarkable. . . ." Cassill has not, however, been entirely bound by tradition. Describing the aesthetic of a fictional group of writers, the narrator of Cassill's novel Clem Anderson (1961) offers an explanation of the aims of Cassill's own short fiction: "The story was to be a consolidation of the gains made by Joyce, Crane, Porter, Hemingway and Faulkner. As I recollect the eager theorizing, the new story was to be as compact as poetry. . . . It was to keep...