In a career spanning five decades, Wilbur Daniel Steele produced nearly two hundred short stories, seven short-story collections, ten novels, and several plays, including two one-acts written for the Provincetown Players. He received four O. Henry Awards (three first places, one second), a Harper's Prize (first place), and a Special O. Henry Award for "maintaining the highest level of merit." With his second wife, actress Norma Mitchell, he coauthored the successful Broadway play Post Road in 1934, and in 1935, with Anthony Brown, he dramatized his story "How Beautiful with Shoes"(Harper's, August 1932) for a Broadway run. Nonetheless, he is today virtually unknown and unread. Although a few of his best stories infrequently appear in anthologies and prose readers, none of his works is currently in print. Yet for a quarter century Steele was popularly and critically acclaimed as one of America's great short-story writers. His impressionistic, romantic yarns, which...