New to the Site: Short Stories by Alexander Woollcott
We’re pleased to announce that a selection of short stories by Alexander Woollcott will be coming to Fish O’baby’s Great Tales over the next few weeks.
Woollcott is best remembered today as a critic, raconteur, and the inspiration for Sheridan Whiteside in The Man Who Came to Dinner — but he was also a gifted storyteller with a sharp eye for the comic and the macabre. His most celebrated collection, While Rome Burns (1934), contains some of the finest short prose of its era, including “Moonlight Sonata,” a masterpiece of understated ghost-story writing, and “Verdun Belle,” his quietly devastating account of a stray dog adopted by American soldiers during the First World War. Both pieces show what Woollcott could do when the showman stepped aside and let the writer take over.
It’s worth noting that Woollcott worked primarily as a critic and essayist, and his fiction tends to blur the line between the personal essay and the tale — which is part of what makes it distinctive. Readers expecting conventional short stories may find something richer and harder to categorize, and that is very much the point.
The stories are presented here as straightforward reading texts. We hope you enjoy them.