With the exception of More Than Human (1953), Sturgeon has done his finest work in short fiction. His best stories, however, remain scattered among a half dozen or more collections. These two collections are chosen to represent his short fiction because they contain several of his best stories and are drawn from two of his most creative periods.

While some of his stories are designed to evoke terror and others simply to entertain, many of Sturgeon's most popular fictions are very much message stories. Two of the stories collected in Sturgeon Is Alive and Well, "Slow Sculpture" (1970) and "Brownshoes" (1969 — originally titled "The Man Who Learned Loving"), are best viewed in the context of the period in which they were written. In the late 1960s and early 1970s the hopes raised by the Civil Rights and Antiwar Movements were collapsing, and many of the youthful participants were...