Regional Short Fiction

Introduction

From its earliest beginnings in folktale and myth, the American short story has reflected the region in which it was created. Not only the setting, the language, and the mood of short fiction but also the subject, the tone, and the pace often point to the particular ground out of which the story grew. Fiction can always be vague (as in gothic novels) or purely imaginary (as in science fiction). Still, most American fiction carries its sense of place as a proud badge of its roots and values. The early American stories are probably Native American stories, traditional creation myths, or trickster tales whose origins lie beyond the mists of time. Still, even these oral tales often reflected the geographical and natural features of the region from which they grew (such as lakes or mountains). It was similar to the first Black American stories, animal tales, or conjure stories, which reflected not only the flora and fauna and local dialect of Southern locales but also the attitudes and conditions of slavery. Regional fiction has followed the development of the United States, from its early history, from frontier stories and the short fiction of the South and New England to stories from the Midwest and the Far West. In each region, short fiction reflected the sense of the particular places it came from, and contemporary short fiction has continued to reveal these geographical and even ethnic roots. Early American short fiction indicated its roots through regional dialects, which writers exaggerated for comic effect. Still, modern regional literature is often recognizable less by its language than by the tempo and energy that an American region gives to its fiction.

Tall Tales, Legends, and Yarns

The early regional short fiction, in addition to Indigenous and Black American forms, were frontier stories of the larger-than-life characters that helped to tame the wilderness as American settlers pushed west. Stories about Davy Crockett, Mike Fink, Paul Bunyan, and other legends of the frontier reflected the developing American character—its rugged individualism and competitive spirit, its raw vitality and frequent violence—and even its colorful, expansive language contrasted sharply with the genteel English of the East, reflected in the British literature Americans busily were importing and reading. Much of this early American literature was oral, and while it is often referred to as the humor of the “Old Southwest,” it is what should be called Southeastern and Midwestern literature, as the frontier of that day was barely past the Mississippi River. Crockett generated (and created) stories about his Tennessee childhood and his years of fighting Indians; Fink was a keel boatman on the Mississippi and later a trapper further west. Bunyan was a mythical lumberjack in the Great Lakes region and the Pacific Northwest. Little of this early regional literature survives in a literary form worth preserving, but these tall tales are important for the influence they had on future generations of writers. The work of Mark Twain and William Faulkner, for example, two of the masters of the American short story, would be unimaginable without this oral tradition upon which they both drew. Stories such as Twain’s “Jim Baker’s Blue-Jay Yarn” or Faulkner’s “Spotted Horses” can be traced directly back to the frontier legacy of oral storytelling they both inherited and upon which they drew.

Southern Short Fiction

The geographical area of the United States most closely associated with regional fiction has always been the American South. Many of the first American tall tales actually came out of the South: Daniel Boone, Crockett, and other legendary figures all started there. Black American folktales and tales of slavery were likewise located by setting and dialect in the American South, and both their poignancy and their humor come from their position in that awful institution at that particular place and time. Joel Chandler Harris would turn his Georgia childhood on a slave plantation in the early 1860s into the stories in his hugely popular Uncle Remus books, published for twenty-five years after 1880. While Harris sentimentalized slave life, his characters (Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox) would enormously impact twentieth-century Black American writers such as Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison. Other regional short fiction had already been building. Augustus Baldwin Longstreet published his humorous but realistic Georgia Scenes in newspapers from 1832 to 1835, while T. B. Thorpe’s “The Big Bear of Arkansas” was a tall tale shaped into a short story in 1841 and published as the title of an anthology of “Southwestern” humor in 1845. The first regional American stories relied less upon setting, the geographical and natural features of a particular place, than upon dialect, the differences in American English in sound and spelling as it was evolving in various regions of the expanding nation. Both George Washington Harris’s Sut Lovingood yarns (collected in 1867) and George Washington Cable’s Old Creole Days stories (1879) were set in the South and depended upon language—in Harris, a coarse, earthy speech from rural Tennessee and in Cable, a more sophisticated New Orleans patois. Cable’s stories are also a good early example of “the local color movement,” a sign of the emergence of distinctive realist fiction in all areas of the nation toward the end of the nineteenth century, including the Midwest and the Northeast. It is impossible to think of American literary realism—the dominant form and style of fiction in the twentieth century—without the local color movement from which it grew. Kate Chopin’s New Orleans stories, for example, convey the richness and tragedy of French Creole life, while Charles Waddell Chesnutt’s stories collected in The Conjure Woman (1899) and The Wife of His Youth, and Other Stories of the Color Line (1899) carry the experience of both Black and White characters in the South as described by a Black American writer.

Southern fiction continued as the dominant regional voice in the twentieth century, and its major practitioner was William Faulkner. For over thirty years, Faulkner produced stories and novels set in the American South, often in his imaginary world of Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. His collected stories, from These Thirteen (1931) through The Unvanquished (1938) and Go Down, Moses (1942) to Knight’s Gambit (1949) and Collected Short Stories of William Faulkner (1950), contain some of the classics of American short fiction, from “A Rose for Emily” (1930) to “Barn Burning” (1939) and “The Bear” (1942). Faulkner’s stories convey a vivid sense of place, its legends and history, and the varied and often painful lives that are lived within it. A story such as “A Rose for Emily” lays bare the values and prejudices, the class and caste, of a Southern town more vividly than could any sociological study. Faulkner was the most famous literary voice in the renaissance of Southern short fiction that dominated the middle of the twentieth century, a list that would include collections by Erskine Caldwell (Kneel to the Rising Sun, and Other Stories, 1935), Richard Wright (Uncle Tom’s Children, 1938), Thomas Wolfe (The Hills Beyond, 1941), Jesse Stuart (Men of the Mountains, 1941), Eudora Welty (The Wide Net, and Other Stories, 1943), Katherine Anne Porter (The Leaning Tower, and Other Stories, 1944), Caroline Gordon (The Forest of the South, 1945), Carson McCullers (The Ballad of the Sad Café and Collected Short Stories, 1951), Flannery O’Connor (A Good Man Is Hard to Find, and Other Stories, 1955), and many others. Various explanations have been given for the dominance of Southern fiction during the middle decades of the twentieth century, and the emergence of Jewish American fiction a little later would call for a similar explanation, but one factor was surely regional: in a troubled period (the Great Depression of the 1930s, followed immediately by World War II, from 1941 to 1945), Southern culture provided a steady and reliable source of myth, custom, and story from which writers could draw. Different as individual Southern writers might be in locale and language, and dark as some of them (Faulkner, O’Connor, McCullers) could be, Southern life provided a knowable world in a period of vast changes and endless fears. It has continued to produce some of the country’s finest short story writers, including Reynolds Price, Ernest Gaines, Wendell Berry, Bobbie Ann Mason, and many others.

Short Fiction of New England

The development of the short fiction of New England had a similar trajectory to that of the American South. The man credited with being the first truly American short-story writer is Washington Irving, and although he borrowed German folktales and dropped them into American settings in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819-1820), as in “Rip Van Winkle,” his fiction shows a sureness and subtlety absent in earlier American efforts. The plot of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” hinges upon a clear regional distinction, between the shrewd Yankee ambition and acquisitiveness of Ichabod Crane (from Connecticut) and the stolid Dutch Knickerbocker qualities of Brom Bones and his mates (from New York). The meaning and humor of the story are achieved through Irving’s manipulation of the rich local details (food, dress, and more) of the story, and the tale works because each area had developed peculiar characteristics of language and manner that Irving could contrast. Literary critics in the first half of the nineteenth century were already beginning to call for a national literature distinct from that of England, and regional writers were supplying the materials for just such a literature. Early New England writers produced comic tales, such as “Down East” or Yankee humor, such as Seba Smith’s letters of Major Jack Downing from Maine in the early 1830s, pieces similar to Southern stories in exaggerating the dialectical idiosyncrasies of the region. The mid-nineteenth century saw the emergence of major American writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville, but their romantic fiction usually transcended place. It was the local colorists at the end of the nineteenth century—especially Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman—who would signal the emergence of a distinctive regional literature in New England, using in its fiction the habits, customs, and language of particular New England areas. Freeman’s “A New England Nun” and “The Revolt of !Mother'," both collected in A New England Nun and Other Stories (1891), provide a vivid sense of place, local dialect, and individual eccentricities in stories of characters who are direct descendants of the Massachusetts Puritans. Conversely, Jewett’s stories in The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), such as “A White Heron” (1886), draw similar pictures of rural life in Maine. This distinctive New England literature would continue through the twentieth century, reaching a high point, perhaps, in what has come to be known as The New Yorker style of John Cheever and John Updike, whose sophisticated tales of suburban and exurban family life often were published in the leading magazine of that name. These tales include "Oh What a Paradise It Seems" (1982), "Here Come the Maples" (1976), and “The Full Glass” (2008). Cheever received the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his collection of short stories, The Stories of John Cheever (1978), and Updike received Pulitzer Prizes for Rabbit Is Rich (1981) and Rabbit at Rest (1990).

Midwestern Short Fiction

The short fiction of the Midwest followed the historical patterns established in the regional literatures of the South and New England. Hamlin Garland provided local color in stories collected in Main-Travelled Roads (1891), which depict the hardships and injustices of farm life from Wisconsin to the Dakotas (“Under the Lion’s Paw” and “Up the Coule”). Chicago newspaperman Finley Peter Dunne developed the character of Mr. Dooley in short pieces notable for their Irish ethnic dialect and humor at the beginning of the twentieth century. The second American literary renaissance (1910-1930) began in fiction with Sherwood Anderson’s starkly realistic story cycle Winesburg, Ohio (1919), and the American short story would never be the same. Characters such as Wing Biddlebaum (in “Hands”) and Alice Hindman (“Adventure”) lead lives of quiet desperation in Anderson’s fictional town, and their bleak surroundings reflect their inner emptiness. It is significant that many of the major writers of this literary renaissance came from the Midwest—Willa Cather (who moved to Nebraska as a child), Theodore Dreiser (from Indiana), Ernest Hemingway (raised outside Chicago), and F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sinclair Lewis (both writers from Minnesota)—and their stories, like their novels, gave national prominence to the people, qualities, and attitudes of Midwestern life. Fitzgerald’s stories of the social life of the young in the 1920s (“Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” 1920, or “Winter Dreams,” 1922), like Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories of fishing on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, have not been matched in realistic short fiction. Not all this short fiction was bleak, however. James Thurber, one of the greatest humorists of the twentieth century, was known for his New Yorker stories and drawings, and some of his best stories (like those collected in My Life and Hard Times, 1933) tell of growing up in Columbus, Ohio, and attending Ohio State University. The twentieth and twenty-first centuries would continue to see notable Midwestern short fiction, from the starkly realistic stories of Chicago life by Nelson Algren to the popular stories of Native American life by Louise Erdrich to the tales of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, that Garrison Keillor narrates weekly on the radio program A Prairie Home Companion.

Stories from California and the West

California and other areas of the West were the last regions to contribute short fiction to American literature, but their contributions were immediately significant. Bret Harte’s stories (such as “Tennessee’s Partner” and “The Outcasts of Poker Flat,” both written about 1870) combine distinctive characterization and rustic dialect with particularized Western settings that at the same time stereotype both. Harte’s friend Mark Twain began his writing career in the West: The story that would launch his long and prolific career, “The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”—an example of Southwestern humor that parodies the form—first appeared in 1865, and many of the stories in the later Roughing It (1872), such as “His Grandfather’s Old Ram,” combine character sketches with tall tales in descriptions of Twain’s adventures in Nevada, California, and Hawaii. Several of the best-known stories by Stephen Crane (including “The Blue Hotel” and “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky”) at the end of the nineteenth century helped to advance realistic fiction through depictions of life on the American frontier, while the stories of Jack London a little later turned realism toward its naturalistic vein, in depictions of life, death, and survival in California and Alaska.

Twentieth-century Western regional short fiction expanded in volume and variety as the literary power base slowly pushed west from New York and Boston. John Steinbeck was a prime reason for this shift, as his stories began to appear in the 1930s—first in The Pastures of Heaven (1932) and then in The Long Valley (1938), a collection that contained the four stories of The Red Pony (1937, 1945), as well as “The Chrysanthemums” and “Flight.” Steinbeck’s short fiction forcefully rendered the hardships of rural farm life and recalled the naturalism of London. Other Western writers who emerged simultaneously included Vardis Fisher, who wrote particularly of Idaho; Wallace Stegner, who wrote moving stories of growing up in the West (including western Canada); and Walter Van Tilburg Clark, who wrote from Nevada. Western writers often complained that the Eastern literary establishment ignored them—that editors, agents, and publishers stuck too close to New York, and that Eastern newspapers and periodicals rarely noticed Western books—but that orientation shifted in the second half of the twentieth century, beginning first with the Beat generation of the 1950s (a movement heavily identified with San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood and anchored in City Lights Books). For example, one of the most popular short-story writers at the end of the century was Raymond Carver, whose minimalist stories often take place in the Northwest, where he spent much of his life. Larry McMurtry’s fiction, often set in Texas and the West also found a national audience. Contemporary short-story writers populate every area of the West; Montana alone, for example, can boast of Rick Bass, Jim Harrison, James Lee Burke, and Thomas McGuane.

The ethnic American literature that dramatically changed the literary geography toward the end of the twentieth century was represented heavily on the West Coast. Asian American writers such as Maxine Hong Kingston and Bharati Mukherjee (The Middleman, and Other Stories, 1988), Native American writers such as James Welch and N. Scott Momaday (The Man Made of Words, 1998), and Mexican American writers such as Gary Soto and Helena Maria Viramontes (The Moths, and Other Stories, 1985) are all essentially Western writers, and they have helped to push the literary compass needle further west. The anthologies of American literature that high school and college students use at the beginning of the twenty-first century are remarkably different from what they would have been one hundred years earlier, and a major difference is the inclusion of ethnic American voices. Many of the stories of such writers reflect their lives in distinct regions of the West, in stories by Ishmael Reed, Carlos Bulosan, Hisaye Yamamoto, and others. Regional ethnic fiction often forces readers to think about national and human borders because the stories describe escapes, characters crossing (or failing to cross) into another life (as in Viramontes’s often anthologized "The Cariboo Café").

Conclusions

Regional American short fiction has followed the trajectory of the country’s development. From the first orthographic stories, satirizing the distinctive spelling and dialects of each region, to the sophisticated, urbane fiction that graces both coasts at the beginning of the twenty-first century, regional short fiction has paralleled the growth of the nation. As Americans pushed west, regional fiction followed, from the South and the Northeast, through the Midwest, to the Pacific Northwest, California, and the Southwest. In 1949, editors Martha Foley and Abraham Rothberg could compile the anthology U.S. Stories: Regional Stories from the Forty-eight States, with contributions such as Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” representing Connecticut and John O’Hara writing from Pennsylvania with “The Doctor’s Son,” Mary Austin from Arizona, and Oliver La Farge from New Mexico. It seemed a perfectly plausible idea to editors in the middle of the twentieth century to compile a collection in which each of the forty-eight stories “gives the flavor, the feeling of life in the state as lived by its people” and “the feelings of people in ways that are unique to various parts of the country,” and together prove that “American literature’s most triumphant achievement is the short story” and “the form most indigenous to American expression.” Years later, the same conclusions hold true, but a collection of modern-day regional short stories would look vastly different from the 1949 anthology. It would also include stories by Indigenous American writers (such as Sherman Alexie and Leslie Marmon Silko), Asian American writers (such as Chang-Rae Lee and Fae Myenne Ng), Latino writers (such as Rudolfo Anaya and Junot Díaz), and other ethnic fictionists. The 1949 anthology had one Black American contribution, and the editors scrambled to explain in their foreword that Richard Wright’s “Bright and Morning Star” did not mean that lynchings were the only activities going on in Tennessee. Editors of a contemporary collection would need no such disclaimer, for ethnic American short fiction validates a multiethnic America readers know.

Regional short fiction continues to represent the sense and range of places in the American landscape, but more writers from those various locales have been given voices in the diverse and multiethnic literature that defines the American character at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Some of these contemporary short fiction works include the 2009 New York Times publication "Victory Lap" by George Saunders, "Pee on Water" (2010) by Rachel B. Glaser, "Then Later, His Ghost" (2014) by Sarah Hall, and "The News of her Death" (2017) by Petina Gappah. Though these works reflect the region in which the author sets the story, contemporary regional short fiction works more loosely reflect their origin than those written in the 1900s or earlier.

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