This is the best collection of the best stories ever written in America. It covers 200 years of fiction including undeniable classics such as "Young Goodman Brown," "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky," and "Soldiers of the Republic," and relatively unknown masterpieces such as "A Dead Issue," by Charles Macomb Flandrau, and "The Meeting Place," by Oliver LaFarge. Writers represented include the well-known and widely-honered (Washington Irving, Jack London, John Steinbeck) and the less-celebrated (Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Robert M. Coates, Seymour Friedgood). Everyone, no matter his or her taste, will find twenty or more of these stories to be among the best they have ever read. Finally, the reader may discover within this volume the doorway to a writer, new to him or her, whose work becomes a lifelong passion.