At the time of its first publication, The Human Experience was a historic publishing event, the first of its kind: an anthology published simultaneously in the United States and the Soviet Union that brought together forty brilliant and celebrated contemporary writers--half of them Americans, half of them Russians--in deeply felt stories and poems which provided glimpses of the life, the work, the play, the textures and humors of the two countries, giving us insight into how we differed, what we had in common.