SOURCE: Introduction to Short Stories by Luigi Pirandello, translated by Lily Duplaix, Simon and Schuster, 1959, pp. vii-xiv.

In the following excerpt from an essay written in 1958 as an introduction to the collection Short Stories, Keene perceives Pirandello's stories to be about the human condition.

Before Pirandello ever wrote a play, he wrote poetry and short stories. The form his thoughts took at their grandest and most expressive—as in Six Characters in Search of an Author and Henry IV—was clearly foreshadowed in the dramatic juxtapositions which characterize his stories, and the tone of the plays at their best has the thin, pure echo of poetry. Thus to know and not merely to skim the works of this uniquely thoughtful dramatist a reader should have access to a fair cross-section of the short stories.

Easier said than done, for Pirandello wrote over three hundred and sixty-five short stories...