Volume 4 | The Complete Short Stories

Though famous for his non-fiction explorations, Ludlow’s bread and butter as a full-time professional writer was the short story. As this volume testifies, he was prolific in his short, fourteen-year career and covered a wide range. His humorous light fiction was set in the daily life of New York City’s upper middle class. He produced several Poe-influenced tales of the weird. And he was most successful when basing stories on emotional incidents from his own life, including tales satirizing religious squabbles (informed by his upbringing by a born-again, Abolitionist preacher), tales of love lost from among his own family’s disappointments, and stories turning on his experiences on the Overland Stage to California in 1863.