Graham Greene, a long-standing admirer of Walter de la Mare, once produced a list of his seventeen favourite de la Mare short stories as '...one man's choice of what he could not, under any circumstances, spare...prose unequalled in its richness since the death of James, or, dare one say...Robert Louis Stevenson.' For many people Walter de la Mare (1873-1956) is as great a writer of fiction as of poetry. W.H.Auden, who used to read de la Mare stories to his niece as well as compiling a Choice of de la Mare's Verse, would have been one of them. But the majority of his short stories, of which there are a hundred, have long been unavailable. Short Stories brings them all together in three volumes in the first comprehensive collection to be published. De la Mare's earliest published works were stories, and he continued writing and rewriting stories throughout the rest of his life.
There was always a creative counterpoint between the themes and imagery of his prose and his poetry -- such as the dream, childhood, the house, night, love lost and regained, solitude and the traveller, as in his first published story 'Kismet' which appeared in 1895, seven years before Songs of Childhood, his initial collection of poetry. A full understanding of either is impossible without knowledge of both. He began bringing out collections of stories when he published The Riddle and Other Stories in 1923. The first volume, Short Stories 1895-1926, starts with this, with its fifteen stories, and continues with two other adult collections, Ding Dong Bell of 1924 with four stories and The Connoisseur and Other Stories of 1926 with nine; and it also includes fourteen uncollected stories published between 1895 and 1920. The publication of Short Stories celebrates the fortieth anniversary of Walter de la Mare's death. It is a literary event of major significance.