Offering significantly more comprehensive and inclusive coverage than similar anthologies, American Short Stories Since 1945 features over seventy short stories written between 1945 and the present. Editor John Parks annotates terms, allusions, and references with which students may be unfamiliar. He also provides brief biographies of the authors and an introductory chapter tracing developments in the short story form in the U.S. since World War II.

Essays on American short-story writers published in the years between 1910 and the end of World War II, with a primary focus on the growth and popularity of works of fiction.