Ernest Hemingway is the foremost American writer of the short story in the first half of the twentieth century, and while he is also a novelist of repute with some four major novels to his name, many critics have felt that as an artist and innovator his most outstanding work lies in his short stories. His famous prose style – plain words, simple but artfully structured syntax, the direct presentation of the object – lends itself particularly to small-scale, concentrated effects. And his subject matter – the fragmentary nature of modern life, with its small local victories and defeats, its focus on the present moment and its prevailing mood of disillusion – also seems to fall naturally into those short forms which deal with glimpse, crisis, turning point and representative episode. If O. Henry is an American vaudeville version of Maupassant, Hemingway can be seen as the successor of Chekhov and Turgenev: he much admired the stories and sketches of the latter, as did Sherwood Anderson. But he was a more disciplined stylist than Anderson, and in his short stories can also be seen as the prose equivalent of Imagist poetry, of which he became aware in the 1920s through his association with modernists like Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. At the same time the personal experience on which he frequently drew directly in his writing was full of confusing tension and conflict – between masculine and feminine elements in his personality, between admiration for physical courage and a growing disillusion with violence, and between the optimism of youth and physical energy, and the inevitable depredations of old age and death.