William Peden
William Peden was an influential American academic and writer, born on March 22, 1913, in New York City. He pursued extensive education, earning a B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. His teaching career was predominantly at the University of Missouri, where he played a vital role in developing the writing program and the university press, as well as co-founding the Missouri Review. Peden was recognized for his editorial work, having served as editor of Story magazine and contributing to various literary journals. He is best known for his groundbreaking study, "The American Short Story: Front Line in the National Defense of Literature," published in 1964, which established the short story as a significant literary genre. His efforts included editing essential collections of short fiction and publishing his own short stories and a novel, "Twilight at Monticello." Peden passed away on July 23, 1999, leaving a lasting impact on the appreciation and critical study of short fiction in American literature.
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William Peden
- Born: March 22, 1913
- Birthplace: New York, New York
- Died: July 23, 1999
Biography
William Peden was born on March 22, 1913 in New York City. After a comfortable childhood spent on Long Island, New York, he attended the University of Virginia, where he received his B.S. (1934), M.S. (1936), and Ph.D. (1942) degrees. He was married twice, and had two daughters from his first marriage. He taught and lectured widely, but spent the majority of his teaching career at the University of Missouri, where, in addition to being a professor of English, he directed the writing program and the university press and helped found the Missouri Review. He also was the editor of Story magazine from 1959 to 1962 and a member of the editorial committee of Studies in Short Fiction beginning in 1963.
Peden’s greatest academic achievement was to establish the short story as a literary genre worthy of critical attention. However, his earliest publications were historical studies of American figures, including Notes on the State of Virginia, which he edited in 1954, and two books he edited with Adrienne Koch: Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson (1944) and Selected Writings of John and John Quincy Adams (1946). In 1964, however, after a year of study on a Guggenheim Fellowship, he published The American Short Story: Front Line in the National Defense of Literature, the landmark study of the genre which helped to establish it as an important literary form in its own right. He later published an enlarged and revised edition of the book, The American Short Story: Continuity and Change (1975).
In support of this classic work, Peden edited several crucial collections of short fiction, including Twenty-Nine Stories (1960), The Golden Shore: Great Stories Selected for Young Readers (1967), and Short Fiction: Shape and Substance (1971.) He also wrote the introduction to Modern Short Stories from Story Magazine (1960).
In addition to his critical studies of short fiction, Peden contributed his own efforts to the genre in highly regarded short stories published in Story, New Mexico Quarterly, Denver Quarterly, and other journals and collected in Night in Funland, and Other Stories (1968), and Fragments and Fictions: Workbooks of an Obscure Writer (1990). He also published a novel, Twilight at Monticello (1973), which did not achieve the acclaim of his short stories.
Peden died on July 23, 1999. He was instrumental in transforming the short story from a stepchild of the novel into an independent form as worthy of critical attention as longer fiction. In his long and productive career, Peden helped to increase interest in the short story at all levels of American readership.