William Faulkner called the short story “the most demanding form after poetry.” The fifty-four stories gathered here show him not only mastering the form but revolutionizing its possibilities, distilling an epic breadth of vision into narratives that conjure an intimate sense of place and the abiding presence of history and legend. Library of America caps its Faulkner edition with this volume presenting all the stories he collected in his lifetime. Carefully curated by the author, each of the three classic collections gathered here has its own artistic coherence and integrity, and is published in a newly corrected text.

The six stories in Knight’s Gambit (1949) feature Yoknapatawpha County lawyer Gavin Stevens, a literary precursor of Atticus Finch. Harvard- and Heidelberg-trained yet sympathetic to the foibles of his small-town and country neighbors, Stevens is equal parts detective, confessor, and knight-errant, single-minded in his pursuit of justice but clear-eyed in his understanding that “justice is accomplished lots of times by methods that wont bear looking at.”

Winner of the National Book Award, Collected Stories (1950) is one of the major works of American short fiction. Its forty-two stories were grouped by Faulkner into six thematic sections that survey the range of his literary universe, from World War I France to Hollywood to the towns and forests of Mississippi. Published just months before Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, it includes such memorable works as the Gothic-inflected “A Rose for Emily,” the heartbreaking “That Evening Sun,” and “The Brooch,” a powerful and unsettling story about a man torn between his mother and his wife.

The hunting stories in Big Woods (1955), the final collection Faulkner saw through the press, were significantly revised for publication in book form, linked with what he called “interrupted catalysts,” brief passages adapted from earlier novels and stories. “The Bear,” the first story in the collection and one of Faulkner’s enduring masterpieces, is a haunting tale about the initiation into adulthood and the terrible pull of the past. The stories that follow move forward into the twentieth century to trace the disappearance of the wilderness and the cultures it sustained.

Rounding out the volume is an appendix containing two classic stories not included in Faulkner’s Collected Stories, “The Hound” and “Spotted Horses,” along with his 1950 Nobel Prize acceptance speech and the fictionalized autobiographical essay “Mississippi.”

Theresa M. Towner holds the Ashbel Smith Chair of Literary Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas. She is the author of The Cambridge Introduction to William Faulkner and Faulkner on the Color Line: The Later Novels, co-author of Reading Faulkner: Collected Stories, and editor of Digitizing Faulkner: Yoknapatawpha in the Twenty-First Century.