First Fiction

Here is where it all began - the professional fiction-writing careers of forty-one of our century's finest authors, from Raymond Carver and Alice Walker to F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ursula K. Le Guin. Spanning nearly eight decades, these short stories mark their creators' breakthroughs from amateur writer to published author. Standing as a testament to the writers' youth and ambition, they bear witness to the emergence of some of the most distinctive literary voices of our time. As Jane Smiley writes in the introduction to First Fiction, "Education begins with publication." The brief…