The Race and Other Stories includes all of Sinclair Ross's previously uncollected short stories and a chapter from Whir of Gold, here titled "The Race," which stands on its own as a short story. Heralded as a prairie writer and best known for his stories of the bleak dust-bowl prairie of the Great Depression, Ross has also written of urban life and, briefly, of army life, as these stories demonstrate.

Not a prolific writer, Ross has published only four novels and eighteen stories. He spends much time rewriting and revising, and he destroys much of what he writes. His work indicates that the discipline and control essential to survival on the prairie can be adapted to the achievement of a controlled art. His taut, economical, rhythmic prose reflects the bleak, spare landscape of the prairie. He achieves economy of style largely through metaphor and through a diction both simple and precise, suggestive and resonant. The concerns of his novels are equally evident in his stories: loneliness and alienation, the sense of entrapment, the imaginative and artistic struggle. Ross's bleakest stories were published between 1934 and 1941, the year he published As For Me and My House. During these years Ross was living in Winnipeg and working for the Royal Bank of Canada. In 1933 he had left Saskatchewan, where as a bank clerk in small prairie towns he had witnessed the combination of economic and climatic disasters of the Great Depression.

Ross's first story, "No Other Way," appeared in Nash's Pall-Mall in October 1934, selected for third prize from among eight thousand entries in the magazine's short-story competition. The story foreshadows many of the stylistic characteristics and thematic preoccupations Ross develops in later work. Ross reveals his concern with personal relationships, especially the interplay between husband and wife against a setting that has an important effect on their relationship. In "No Other Way," as in later stories, he shows the effect on a marriage of years of exhausting struggle. The portrait of Hatty Glenn is the first of many portraits of prairie farm wives. Hatty has made a success of the farm by dint of hard physical labour while her husband has devoted his time to wheat and land speculations. Hatty has become wrinkled and worn as well as shrewish, bitter, and parsimonious, and her still youthful-looking husband has grown away from her. Facing her situation, Hatty contemplates suicide only to realize that for her there is "no other way" but to continue, stoically, working, as she has done for twenty years. In "No Other Way" Ross does not present the drought-ridden farm we come to know in "A Lamp at Noon" and other stories of this period but the successful farm. The theme of antimaterialism he develops twenty-four years later in The Well is evident here. As in The Well the protagonist looks back to the struggling past as happier than the materially successful present. As in The Well an abandoned well becomes the focal point for recollections of past happiness:

. . . she came to the bleached cribbing of an old, unused well.

She looked at it reflectively, remembering how her arms used to ache when she had to pull up water with a rope and pail, before they drilled the new well and could afford a windmill. There was an old roan cow that used to drink eight pailfuls, night and morning, and then leave the trough reluctantly.

And yet, that had been the vital, solid time of her life. The work had a purpose behind it: there had been something to look forward to. It used to seem that a windmill, and a big house with carpets and a gramophone, were all that was needed to make life perfect: and now, after all the old wishes had been realised, here she was, back at the well.

Though the well as a symbol of vital, meaningful activity and shared love, and as a link between past and present, hope and disillusion, is more skilfully woven into the fabric of the novel, this first story shows us the early development of Ross's concern with the contrast between past and present, illusion and reality, a contrast that recurs throughout the canon. We also find in "No Other Way" the endurance so characteristic of many of Ross's later protagonists and the theme of entrapment so prevalent in much of his later work.

Stylistically, the story provides an indication of the course Ross follows in future works. The first sentence prefigures one of the most outstanding characteristics of his style, his metaphoric use of nature: "Out of a sprawling sunset, ragged and unkempt, as if in a sullen mood it had grown careless of itself, the October wind dragged a clamping resolute night." The image itself and the symbol are awkward in comparison with Ross's later more subtle use of imagery and smoother, less stilted phrasing, yet it is an appropriate image for this account of a bitter, unkempt, and sullen woman and her attempt to influence her resolutely indifferent husband. Except for one brief revelation of her husband's thoughts, the third-person narrative is told from the point of view of the wife, the narrative point of view which characterizes most of the later stories of prairie farmers and their wives. The momentary shift in viewpoint is unexpected and inappropriate, the technical failing of a less experienced writer. The irony present in most of Ross's writings is evident in the dilemma of Hatty Glenn, who realizes that she has lost her husband through her excessive devotion to the farm she had considered to be their shared concern. The story is cyclic; it begins and ends with Hatty chasing cows out of the turnips, a scene not without humour, but a scene signifying her entrapment. Her situation at the end of the story is the same as it was at the beginning.

"No Other Way" lacks the subtlety and psychological complexity which are major sources of strength in Ross's later writing: the emotion is less intense, the handling of voice is less skillful, and the style is not always as graceful as in succeeding stories. Nevertheless, the story points the direction Ross will take.

"Nell," published seven years later, is similar in theme to "No Other Way." Again a woman is trying to win back the love of her husband. Eight years married, Nell recognizes her own rawboned ugliness in contrast with her husband's slight build and fine features. She cuts a ridiculous figure when she wears a silk dress and high-heeled shoes to accompany her husband to town one hot Saturday evening. Ross recalls that "Nell" had its origin in an incident in which a man did forget to pick up his wife waiting for him at the store but, unlike Nell's husband, he returned to town to get her. The ketchup Nell buys because her husband likes it becomes a symbol of her continuing devotion to him despite his neglect of her. Again, as in "No Other Way," communication between husband and wife is virtually impossible. For Nell, "Words were always a labor. The task of explanation now was beyond her." Reticence, stubbornness, insensitivity, and the kind of inarticulateness demonstrated here, cause rifts between such women and their husbands. Nell and Hatty are isolated on their farms, lacking the freedom of their husbands to find diversion or solace elsewhere, and hence are more dependent on their husbands than their husbands are on them. Unlike the wives in some of Ross's stories who are better educated and more intelligent than their husbands, Nell and Hatty feel their husbands to be superior.

In Ross's world, dreaming is necessary to sustain hope. Nowhere is dreaming as escape from reality more in evidence than in his stories of children. Ross's children are imaginative and hopeful. In "A Day with Pegasus," eight-year-old Peter Parker is propelled into a fantasy world by the fulfillment of his dream of having his own horse. Even a detention from his uncomprehending teacher, who mistakes his imaginative composition for a lie, fails to quench his delight. The colt becomes a Pegasus carrying Peter into an exciting new world:

There was a state of mind, a mood, a restfulness, in which one could skim along this curve of prairie floor and, gathering momentum from the downward swing, glide up again and soar away from earth. He succeeded now, borne by a white-limbed steed again. And as they soared the mystery was not solved but gradually absorbed, a mystery still but intimate, a heartening gleam upon the roof of life to let him see its vault and spaciousness.

This story not only reveals the excitement and wonder of childhood but also contrasts this excitement and wonder with the overliteral and unimaginative attitude of the adult unable to comprehend or value a child's fantasies. The colt is Peter's agent of escape from the dreary and restricted everyday world. Though Ross later uses the first-person point of view in stories of childhood, in this early story he uses the third person, as he does in most early stories, and he gets inside the mind of his young protagonist by using him as the centre of intelligence. In later works, such as "Cornet at Night" and "Circus in Town," Ross continues to contrast the imaginative child with the adult who because of lack of opportunity or stimulus has lost the gift of transcending reality. This theme is linked with Ross's conception of the struggling artist which he develops in As For Me and My House and in Whir of Gold.

"A Day with Pegasus" is one of several stories centred on the same boy which Ross at one time planned as a group. "At the beginning," Ross writes, "I had in mind a group of short stories having to do with the same boy. In "Cornet at Night" he becomes really aware, for the first time, of the wonder of music—I suppose you could call it an aesthetic wakening. "One's a Heifer" is his first contact with evil (although the man in the story, Vickers, is not evil, of course, but deranged). There was to have been one about death—he loses his parents in a fire, which is why in "One's a Heifer" he is living with an aunt and uncle. "A Day with Pegasus," the mystery of life and beginning, etc."

"The Race" continues the adventures of what could be considered the same young boy. Sonny is a prairie farm boy, now a clarinetist in Montreal. In the novel, the race is one of several flashbacks to his prairie childhood. In Sonny's mind, music is joined with his spirited horse Isabel; both were stimuli to his imaginative life in the bleak environment of his childhood. Throughout this adventure, Isabel remains her cocky, assured self, a fitting ally for her confident young rider. Isabel's arrogance and pride are a projection of Sonny's own arrogance and pride.

"The Race" is closely linked with the earlier story "The Outlaw." In fact, Isabel is described in almost the same words as in "The Outlaw":

One horse and all horses—somehow representative. Chargers, mustangs, Arabians, standing beside her in the stall, I knew and rode them all. In the neigh and eyes and forelock there was history. Battle and carnage, trumpets and glory—she understood and carried me triumphantly.

She was coal-black, gleaming, queenly. Her mane had a ripple and her neck an arch. And somehow, softly and mysteriously, she was always burning. The reflection on her glossy hide, sun or lantern, seemed the glow of some secret passion. There were moments when you felt the whole stable charged with her, as if she were the priestess of her kind, in communion with her deity.

The self-contained incident of "The Race" possesses the characteristics we are accustomed to find in Ross's stories: humour, economy, skilful combination of dialogue with retrospective narration, and an introductory conversation which leads directly into the action. Since the story is a flashback, the point of view is the dual perspective Ross uses in most of his stories of young boys. The adult Sonny, recalling his past, relives the childhood event while retaining his adult perspective on his younger self. The narrative voice speaks for the two points of view simultaneously.

As a result of his wartime experience, Ross started a novel of a Canadian soldier from Manitoba, but he was never satisfied with it and eventually destroyed it. All that remains of his army years are two stories, both based partly on experience. "Barrack Room Fiddle Tune" is a light story stemming from Ross's having had as a barrack mate a country boy who played the fiddle. The boy's off-key playing irritated his mates, but nothing untoward happened, Ross tells us, except for the occasional boot flung in his direction. The idea for "Jug and Bottle" occurred to Ross when, like the protagonist in the story, he mistakenly assumed early in his tour of duty in England that the words "Jug and Bottle" on a pub signified its name. The element of chance in this story of a suicidal young soldier is akin to the element of determinism in several of the prairie stories where an indifferent nature plays a large part in deciding man's fate.

"Spike," read on CBC radio, is published here for the first time in English. The panic of a man terrorized by a teenage hitch-hiker depends largely on the clipped, terse rhythm of the language. The man's terror is accentuated by the bored tone of his teenage daughter when he calls home. In the earlier story "Saturday Night," the teenager is a naive adolescent from a simpler world. Like Spike, he is coming home to see his girl friend. The myth of romantic love he had built up around the girl is destroyed when he sees that her interpretation of their relationship is very different from his. To her, he was just another date. His story is an initiation.

With "The Flowers that Killed Him," a story of perversion and murder, Ross demonstrates his fascination with the criminal mind which he explores at greater length in The Well and Whir of Gold. An unexpected ending adds an extra dimension to the story. Ross does not attempt to get into the mind of the killer, but views him from outside, from the perspective of a thirteen-year-old boy. Thus we see only the mask the murderer wears to the world.

"The Flowers that Killed Him" is Ross's last published story. It is written with the same skill and economy that distinguish his earlier stories. He has since published one novel, Sawbones Memorial. Like his last story, the novel demonstrates that Ross has not lost the artistry he displayed in earlier stories and in As For Me and My House.