SOURCE: "The Short Stories of William Sansom: A Retrospective Commentary," in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 25, No. 4, Fall, 1988, pp. 421-31.

Peden is an American critic and educator who has written extensively on the American short story and on American historical figures such as Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams. Here, he arques that Sansom's work is underappreciated and praises the "almost uncanny blending of the real and the fantastic" in the author's tales, as well as Sansom's ability to evoke a scene.

The product of one of the most undervalued and least appreciated major twentieth-century fiction writers, William Sansom's short stories were never widely read or appreciated in the United States. And since his death in 1976, they have been virtually ignored. Seldom anthologized or written about, they are now out of print and poorly represented in the libraries of most North American colleges and universities. . . .

Sansom's first published...