Wallace Stegner has been steadily enriching readers' lives for more than half a century now, but he stopped writing short stories in the mid-1950's. As he tells us in the foreword to this collection, he believes the short story to be the province of younger writers. It is "made for discoveries and nuances and epiphanies," he says, "and superbly adapted for trial syntheses."

His admirers will take him any way they can get him—novels, essays, biographies—but after sinking into these stories gathered from "a lifetime of writing" we can't help but mourn the passing of his short-story days. These stories are so large, they're so wholehearted Plainty, he never set out to write a mere short story. It was all or nothing.

The 31 titles "lie as they fell," he says, and yet apparently this does not mean they appear in chronological order Still, they appear to provide an overview of the writer's progress—and, by extension, of the American short story's progress during a crucial period in its history. The pieces that seem to have been written earlier (although they are undated here) often describe static situations: a group of men splitting wood for a neighbor, a married couple celebrating the soldier husband's furlough. If a shift of vision occurs, It's generally one-that modern readers, at least, are able to predict. A vacationer who snubs an outsider at a posh resort discovers that he himself is also an outsider. A man observing from a distance the classic tableau of war wives waiting at a mailbox learns, when he becomes closer acquainted, that not all of these apparent Penelopes are as virtuous as they seem.

But even these more transparent pieces possess a sauntering case that seems ahead of its time. One story begins by quoting the "balloons" in a popular comic strip and goes on to toss at us, offhandedly, the image of the morning, sun "scrambled in the bedclothes." Another says of a habitually tense woman, "You could almost lift up the cover board and pluck her nerves like the strings of a piano."

A more complex and ambiguous story. "The Double Corner," describes a woman's fight to keep her senile motherin-law out of a nursing home. Even her husband argues with her, but she insists on taking the old woman in. This isn't as cut and dried as the other stories. It vacillates, it positively shimmers, as the younger woman's stance first seems only proper, then thoroughly misguided, then proper after all, and so on.

Another example of the right-again, wrong-again theme is "Pop Goes the Alley Cat." Perhaps the most sophisticated of the stories, it covers a photographer's tour of a Los Angeles barrio in the company of a young social worker. Nothing is quite what you expect here: the juvenile delinquent at the story's center is unattractive and unlikable, his jivey speech and gestures reproduced with startling accuracy, and the photographer is a cynic:

Prescott felt dourly that he was getting an education in social workers. One rule was that the moment your delinquent showed the slightest sign of decency, passed you a cigarette or picked up something you had dropped, you fell on his neck as if he had rescued you from drowning . . . But then what? he asked himself. After you've convinced him that every little decency of his deserves a hundred times its weight in thanks, then what?

And lenst expected is the attitude of the social worker herself, who turns out to be a modern version of a saint, nobody's fool after all but still determined to give the boy more chances than anyone in her right mind would dream of. Precisely because the story is so unsentimental, so fierce, it moves us.

In "The City of the Living," a man vacationing in Cairo keeps a night watch over his son's typhoid fever. Every agonizing minute is familiar to anyone who has ever had a sick child, but the story's epiphany still comes as a surprise. "He had been doing something like praying all night, praying to modern medicine propitiating science. . . . But suppose he had prayed in thanksgiving, where would he have directed his prayer? Not to God, not to Allah, not to the Nile or any of its creature-gods or the deities of light. To some laboratory technician in a white coat. To the Antibiotic God. For the first time it occurred to him what the word 'antibiotic' really meant!"

This may, in fact, be what Wallace Stegner's individual-progress is all about. From stories we nod at knowingly, however excellent they may be, the stories that take our breath away with the unforeseen. In "The Traveler," a traveling salesman's car dies on a frozen country road and he seeks help from a young boy at a farmhouse. This appears at first to be merely a tale of survival, but while we're looking the other way, worrying over spark plugs and hypothermia the real point slips in almost unnoticed. The boy reminds the salesman of his own boyhood self, in the days when he too searched every stranger's face; and when the salesman takes his leave he looks back "to fix forever the picture of himself standing silently watching himself go."

Three of Mr. Stegner's full-length works (the novels Recapitulation and The Big Rock Candy Mountain and the frontier history Wolf Willow) evolved from stories in this collection. By far the most numerous seminal pieces are those that led to The Big Rock Candy Mountain. Readers who have lost their very souls to the complicated doings of the Mason family will love these early glimpses of them—some reproduced later almost word for word in the novel, others vastly altered. It's interesting that even the stories that later reappear unchanged seem so different here—more immediate, more significant. A scene that makes barely a ripple within a chapter stands out hard and sharp when it's a short story.

The story that stays with us the longest, though, is "Genesis," a riveting saga of a young Englishman's introduction to Saskatchewan. The time is 1906, a year with a notoriously bitter winter, and what begins as the Englishman's first cattle roundup very nearly ends as his last. This story resembles the average western about as much as Anna Karenina resembles a dimestore romance. It is vivid, particular, intensely felt; you could swear that Wallace Stegner (who happens to have been born in 1909) personally took part in all he describes, and even if you read it in front of a roaring fire you'll find yourself checking for frostbite.

Another reason that the short story is the younger writer's province, Mr. Stegner says in the foreword, is that it uses up so many beginnings and endings. That's not just the writer's problem; it's also the reader's. Beginnings, especially, are work for us as well, and the fact that we embark on each, of these stories so willingly testifies to our trust in where they'll lead us. This collection is as solid as good furniture. Whatever other genres Wallace Stegner may go on to—and let's hope he goes on for a long long time—he has provided us with an enduring reminder of the short story's capabilities.