The broken wheel and other stories

What makes a story rise above others and cause the writer to be known not only in his own country but throughout the world?
Most often it is the common humanity found in the story the feeling it gives to each of us that we, too, know or have known or will know the same joys and sadness, hopes and despair.
Here are eight such stories by a group of America’s finest writers. Three of them Sinclair Lewis, Stephen Vincent Benet, and Oliver La Fargeare Pulitzer Prize winners, and Sinclair Lewis was further honored by being awarded the nobel Prize for literature in 1930.