Twentieth Century Tales

About the Book

Twenty pieces of fiction about characters who range from fourteen to eighty one years of age, these short stories belong to the twentieth century probably only in the sense that their background is drawn from that century.  Certainly these ordinary people have ordinary--perhaps even trivial--problems that have nothing to do with either the technological advances nor the moral retreats characteristic of the twentieth century.  Rather they have everything to do with the persisting human struggle to understand, accept and learn from the same old dilemmas of any century.  For  the very young there is the  mystery of distilling abstract ideas from sensory experiences; for the very old, the need for applying distilled experience to troublesome concrete situations; and for others at various points in the arc of a lifetime, the discovery of significant insights when faced with  problems hardly unique to the closing century.

About the Author

Frances A. Sugrue earned her Bachelor of Arts degree from Rosary College (now Dominican University) in River Forest, Illinois and her Master of Arts degree from Loyola University, Chicago. Her career was in administratiion in the Federal Government where she was a regional director of two rural health programs for the then Departmentof Health, Education and Welfare. Since college days she has written occasional short stories, published in magazines no longer in existence. None of the stories in this book has been previously published. In 1998 she wrote and self-pulished a family biography, The Sugrue Story, that covers an international Irish clan. Clann OSiochru, founded ten years ago, has members living in Australia, Canada, Egypt, England, Ireland, New Zealand, Taiwan, and the United States. Currently she writes a column for this clan’s quarterly news letter. Her hobbies, since retirement, have been collecting antique dolls and genealogy.