This was one of several shows Olmsted created over the decades in which he read from popular literary sources. He was, in his day, an ancestor to audiobooks. The stories he read on the World's Greatest Short Stories were dramatized only through Olmsted's voice and a bit of musical accompaniment. Fortunately, Olmsted's voice carried itself well even in live radio, his voice deftly moving between narration to spoken dialogue, adopting accents where appropriate and moving a falsetto when he had to speak women's dialogue. Olmsted worked in quite a few radio programs as a dramatic performer, including the Chase and X Minus One but he's best-remembered for his readings of short stories such as heard on this program and in his 1940s series Story for Tonight and his 1950s series Sleep No More.
Olmsted had a particular love for the works of Edgar Allan Poe and among the surviving episodes of the World's Greatest Short Stories he narrated several of his tales: "the Raven," "the Case of Monsieur Valdemar" and "the Tell-Tale Heart."
Olmsted had a terrific knack for finding interesting stories to share. Some of episodes of the World's Greatest Short Stories feature favourites of mine like the Poe stories listed above, or the likes of Fitz-James O'Brien's "What Was It?", Ambrose Bierce's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" and "the Man and the Snake" or Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Rappacini's Daughter." But several of the stories he presented were previously unknown to me and quite good, especially the story "Quality" by John Galsworthy, the story of an old-fashioned shoemaker who creates quality material but can't compete in a marketplace that values speed above all.
Here's a YouTube playlist of the surviving episodes of the World's Greatest Short Stories, collected by a fan.
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