Short story

A short story is a work of prose narrative fiction, typically ranging from 1,600 to 30,000 words. The genre’s first theorist, Edgar Allan Poe, believed that the short story should be brief enough to be read in one sitting. He also argued for the "unity of effect," insisting that every word in the story should contribute to the effect predetermined by the author. As the short story evolved, the term proved resistant to definition, but that has not deterred writers and critics. In addition to economy and unity, other elements proposed as genre-defining include an epiphanic moment, the quality of suggestiveness, and an evocation of mood. Although each of these elements holds true for some short stories, significant exceptions could easily be cited; thus, these and other proposals failed in their efforts to define the short story. The only definition to win widespread agreement is a negative one: a short story is not a novel.

Brief History

Narrative existed long before such terms as "short story" and "novel" were used to distinguish forms. Myths and didactic tales are part of the most ancient cultures, part of oral tradition before literacy. The earliest written stories were often in verse rather than prose. Among the earliest precursors of the short story were India’s Panchatantra, five books of animal fables and magic tales compiled, in their current form, between the third and fifth centuries CE but perhaps dating from about 200 BCE; Aesop’s Fables, written by a Greek slave probably between 620 and 564 BCE; and the tales of The Thousand and One Nights, which originated in tenth-century Persia. From the Judeo-Christian tradition came the stories of such characters as Ruth, Esther, and Jonah, and the parables of Jesus such as the Prodigal Son and the Good Samaritan. Another precursor was the fabliau, a brief, bawdy, comic tale that was popular in thirteenth-century France. This form was used by Giovanni Boccaccio in his Decameron (1349–51) and by Geoffrey Chaucer in his Canterbury Tales (1387–1400).

The modern short story began in the nineteenth century. An increase in literacy rates and the proliferation of magazines and newspapers fostered the development of the genre. Washington Irving’s "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and "Rip Van Winkle," first published in 1819–20 in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, have been described as the "founding stories" of the American short story. Poe may be the author most often credited as the father of the modern short story, but Russian writer Nikolai Gogol published Arabesques in 1835, five years before Poe’s Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. Gogol’s most famous story, "The Overcoat," (1842) was particularly influential in the development of Russian fiction. Anton Chekhov, a prolific writer of short stories in the late nineteenth century, is thought by many critics to be the greatest short story writer of all time. Chekhov influenced writers as diverse as Flannery O’Connor, Raymond Carver, and John Cheever. Frenchman Guy de Maupassant is another master of the short story. Between 1880 and 1890 alone, he published more than three hundred stories. Widely read in English-speaking countries, he was a major influence on American writer Kate Chopin. Some scholars credit Sir Walter Scott with founding the short story in England, but he was followed in the Victorian era by a bevy of British writers who wrote short fiction, including Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, and H. G. Wells.

Despite the significant contributions of European writers, the modern short story since its beginnings has been viewed as a particularly American genre. In 1842, the publication of the second edition of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales marked a signal moment in the history of the short story. In a review of Hawthorne’s collection for Graham’s Magazine, Poe articulated his theories on the short story, becoming the first critic to consider the short story as a literary form meriting the consideration awarded other literary genres. Poe put his theories into practice in such acclaimed stories as "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839) and "The Cask of Amontillado" (1846). He is credited with inventing the modern detective story in 1841 with "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," which introduced C. Auguste Dupin, who solves crimes through a process Poe called "ratiocination," or rational thinking. Dupin is the ancestor of such popular fictional detectives as Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, and Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe.

Hawthorne’s short stories, along with his novel The Scarlet Letter, were particularly well regarded and influential in American literature. "Young Goodman Brown," set, like The Scarlet Letter, in Puritan New England, is arguably his best story. Herman Melville’s "Bartleby the Scrivener" (1853), Stephen Crane’s "The Open Boat" (1897), and Henry James’s "The Turn of the Screw" (1898) are regarded as among their authors’ most notable achievements. The short story was the favored form of the local-color writers who emerged after the Civil War, mining the folklore, mores, and geographical setting of a particular region. Mark Twain’s "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" (1865) started his career, and traces of local color persist in his most celebrated novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). Bret Harte found inspiration in the California Gold Rush and produced stories such as "The Luck of Roaring Camp" (1868). Sarah Orne Jewett, whose stories, such as "The Flight of Betsey Lane" (1893), focus on rural New England, is considered one of the finest local colorists.

Some writers of local-color short stories used the form to explore social issues in their communities. Kate Chopin’s short story collection Bayou Folk (1894) explores the cultural communities of Louisiana. "Desiree’s Baby" is a tale of interracial relationships, and "At the ’Cadian Ball" concerns Cajun characters. "Ozeme’s Holiday" from her second collection, A Night in Acadie (1897), centers on Creole culture. George Washington Cable, a white Southerner who spoke against racial oppression, took the same stance in the stories in Old Creole Days (1879), a collection of short stories about Creole life in New Orleans. Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman (1899) used the conventions of local color fiction to refute the romanticized view of slavery made popular in Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus stories and Thomas Nelson Page’s plantation fiction.

During the first decade of the twentieth century, O. Henry was hailed as a master of the short story and enjoyed both critical acclaim and commercial success. Stories such as "The Gift of the Magi" (1905) and "The Ransom of Red Chief" (1907) were enormously popular, but beginning in the 1920s, his stories were dismissed as sentimental and formulaic by the literary establishment. Ironically, the O. Henry Award, established in 1918, is one of the most prestigious awards for short fiction. His contemporary Jack London fared better in the opinions of later critics. London’s Klondike stories such as "The Law of Life" (1901), "Love of Life" (1905), and "To Build a Fire" (1908) demonstrate his mastery of the themes of environmental determinism and survival of the fittest. His influence on younger writers, including Ernest Hemingway, Norman Mailer, and Jack Kerouac, was powerful, and his reputation among foreign critics exceeds his reputation in America.

Both O. Henry and London commanded high prices for their stories, making the short story a lucrative proposition for writers of the next decade. Purportedly, the Saturday Evening Post paid F. Scott Fitzgerald four thousand dollars for a single short story in 1929. Fitzgerald wrote sixty-eight stories for the magazine between 1920 and 1937, earning about two million dollars. Hemingway accused Fitzgerald of pandering, but many of Hemingway’s best known stories, including "Hills Like White Elephants" (1927) and "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" (1936) were first published in magazines such as Scribner’s and Cosmopolitan. Some of William Faulkner’s most acclaimed stories also appeared first in the pages of magazines. Scribner’s published "Spotted Horses" (1931) and Harper’s published "Barn Burning" (1939).

Short Stories Today

By the 1940s, a new generation of writers was winning recognition for short stories. Eudora Welty’s A Curtain of Green and Other Stories (1941) included "A Worn Path," "Petrified Man," and "Why I Live at the P. O.," stories that remain among her most valued work. Katherine Anne Porter, in her introduction to the collection, praised Welty’s gift and forecast a significant career for her as a writer of short stories. John Cheever has been described as America’s "Chekhov of Suburbia" so often that the epithet is almost an extension of his name. Beginning in 1935, Cheever published more than one hundred stories in the New Yorker, perhaps the most prestigious forum for literary short stories. The Stories of John Cheever (1978), a collection of sixty-one of his stories, is an impressive example of critical and commercial success. It won a $500,000 advance and both the National Book Critics’ Circle Award and Pulitzer Prize. However, it is the blend of myth and social realism in his work that has inspired writers such as John Barth and Thomas Pynchon. Dashiell Hammett served his apprenticeship in pulp magazines, mostly the Black Mask, which published dozens of Hammett’s stories between 1923 and 1930. In the Continental Op stories, Hammett drew upon his experience with the Pinkerton National Detective Agency to create a new kind of detective. Fellow detective fiction writer Raymond Chandler famously declared that Hammett brought the detective from upper-crust environs into the alley.

In the second half of the twentieth century, signs indicated that the short story had acquired status comparable to the novel. In 1951, the second National Book Award was given to The Collected Stories of William Faulkner. Jewish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer won the National Book Award for A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories in 1957, and Bernard Malamud’s collection The Magic Barrel won the following year. Singer was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1978. Frank O’Connor, an Irish short story writer who has been called his nation’s Chekhov, published The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story in 1963, a rare critical examination of the genre.

Another O’Connor was one of the most distinctive voices among the chorus of post–World War II short story writers. Flannery O’Connor’s first short story collection, A Good Man Is Hard to Find, was published in 1955. A Roman Catholic from the Deep South Bible Belt, O’Connor created a fictional world in which violence was a necessary prelude to moments of grace. John Updike’s short stories were vastly different from O’Connor’s, but his stories too reflected his theology. Over a career that spanned half a century, Updike wrote 186 short stories, many of them first published in the New Yorker. His best-regarded stories range from "A&P" (1960), perhaps his best-known story, to "My Father’s Tears" (2005), written when Updike was seventy-three.

The decades of the 1960s and 1970s saw an increase in the number of writers creating short stories about the black experience. James Baldwin’s collected stories Going to Meet the Man (1965) explored sex and race; Toni Cade Bambara’s Gorilla, My Love (1972) and The Sea Birds Are Still Alive (1977) centered on the sustaining connections of family and friendship; and Alice Walker’s In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women (1973) espoused her "womanist," or black feminist, position in stories about the oppression of black women and their strength in struggle. The 1970s also saw the first of Raymond Carver’s four major short-story collections, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (1976). His spare prose and blue-collar world void of passion and hope drew praise from critics. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981), Cathedral (1983), and Where I’m Calling From (1988) established Carver as a leading figure in what critics hailed as a renaissance of the short story in the late twentieth century.

The short story has continued to prosper into the twenty-first century, albeit in forms far removed from the traditional short story. Lorrie Moore has the narrator of "How to Be a Writer," a story from her first collection Self-Help (1985), decide that plots are for the dead, not for writers, self-referential irony in this case since Moore’s story is plotless. An absence of plot is only one form of innovation. George Saunders’s blend of the bizarre and the ordinary earned his story collections best-seller status and called forth superlatives from fellow authors and critics alike. Tenth of December, his fourth collection of stories, received the first Folio Prize for the best fiction in the English language in 2014. Lydia Davis, winner of the Man Booker International Prize in 2013, is famous for the brevity of her fiction, some stories consisting of a single sentence.

The short stories of Canadian writer Alice Munro are definitely not minimalist; some of them skirt the boundary between short story and novella. Munro’s disregard of chronology is the quality that has been praised as revolutionary in its effect on story structure. She published fourteen story collections, beginning with Dance of the Happy Shades (1968) and concluding with Dear Life (2012). When Munro won the Man Booker International Prize in 2009, the judges praised her achievement in the short story format as the equal of most novelists’ achievement over a lifetime. In the announcement that Munro was the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013, the Swedish Academy hailed her as a "master of the contemporary short story." Munro’s first reaction to her Nobel Prize was to express the hope that it would bring greater recognition of the short story as "important art."

Bibliography

Achilles, Jochen, and Ina Bergmann, eds. Luminality and the Short Story: Boundary Crossings in American, Canadian, and British Writing. New York: Routledge, 2015. Print.

Current-Garcia, Eugene. The American Short Story before 1850: A Critical History. Boston: Twayne, 1985. Print.

Fatma, Gulnaz. A Short History of the Short Story: Western and Asian Traditions. Ann Arbor: Modern History, 2012. Print.

Goyet, Florence. The Classic Short Story, 1870–1925: Theory of a Genre. Cambridge: Open Book, 2014. Digital file.

Nagel, James. The American Short Story Handbook. Hoboken: Wiley, 2015. Print.

Orel, Harold. The Victorian Short Story: Development and Triumph of a Literary Genre. New York: Cambridge UP, 1986. Print.

Scofield, Martin, ed. The Cambridge Introduction to the American Short Story. New York: Cambridge UP, 2006. Print.

Young, Emma, and James Bailey, eds. British Women Short Story Writers: The New Woman to Now. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2015. Print.