The first volume of Polya's papers deals with singular points of analytic functions and with other broadly related topics, such as conformal mappings, entire functions, and the rate of growth of analytic functions. The papers are arranged in chronological order, but the editor, in his introduction, shows that they fall into four main sets of topics. The first is concerned with properties of a function (in particular, the location and nature of its singular points) as deduced from the properties of the coefficients in its power series. A second set deals with a closely related problem: connections between global properties of a function and its values at an isolated set of points. Analytic functions, especially entire functions, are the subject of a third set of papers, and a final set of six investigates problems in conformal mapping.