1. Stages in the Development of the American Short Story.

THE period between the Civil War in America and the outbreak of the Great War in Europe in 1914 may be termed in 1
the history of prose fiction the Era of the Short Story. Everywhere, in France, in Russia, in England, in America, more
and more the impressionistic prose tale, theconteshort, effective, a single blow, a moment of atmosphere, a glimpse
at a climactic instantcame, especially in the magazines, to dominate fictional literature. Formless at first, often
overloaded with mawkishness, with essay effects, with moralizing purpose, and dominating background, it grew
constantly in proportion and restraint and artistic finish until it was hailed as a new genre, a peculiar product of
nineteenth century conditions, one especially adapted to the American temperament and the American kultur.
That the prose story was no innovation peculiar to later literature, is an axiom that must precede every discussion of
it. It is as old as the race; it has cropped out abundantly in every literature and every period. That it has taken widely
differing forms during its long history is also axiomatic. Every generation and every race has had its own ideals in the
matter, has set its own fashions. One needs remember only The Book of Ruth, The Thousand and one Nights, the
Elizabethan novella, the Sir Roger de Coverley papers, Johnsons Rambler, Hannah Mores moral tales, and the
morbid romance of the early nineteenth-century annuals. The modern short story is only the latest fashion in story
tellingshort fiction la mode.
2. Beginnings.
In America the evolution of the form may be traced through at least four stages. It began with the eighteenth-century tale
of the Hannah More type, colourless, formless, undramatic, subservient, to use a contemporary phrase, only to the
interest of virtuea form peculiarly adapted to flourish in the Puritanic atmosphere of the new nation. Such stories
as Chariessa, or a Pattern for the Sex and The Danger of Sporting with Innocent Credulity, both from Careys Columbian
Magazine established in 1786, satisfied the American reading public for half a century.
3. Irving.
Then came the work of Washington Irving 1 the blending of the moral tale with the Addisonian essay, especially in 4
its Sir Roger de Coverley phase. The evolution was a peculiar one, a natural result of that isolation of early America
which belated all its art forms and kept it always a full generation behind the literary fashions of London. Irvings
early enthusiasms came from the shelves of the paternal library rather than from the book stalls of the vital centres
where flowed the current literature of the day. To the impressionable youth Addison and Steele and Goldsmith were as
fresh and new as they had been to their first readers. The result appears in his first publication, Salmagundi, a
youthful Spectator, and later in his first serious work, The Sketch Book, another essay periodical since it was issued in
monthly numbersa latter-dayBee. Never did he outgrow this formative influence: always he was of the eighteenth
century, an essayist, a moralist, a sketcher of manners, an antiquarian with a reverence for the past, a sentimentalist.
His sketchy moral essays and his studies of manners and character grew naturally into expository stories, illustrations,
narratives of a traveller set in an atmosphere attractive to the untravelled American of the time, all imagination and
longing. He added to the moral tale of his day characterization, humour, atmosphere, literary charm, but he added no
element of constructive art. He lacked the dramatic; he overloaded his tales with descriptions and essay material; and
he ended them feebly. His stories, even the classic Rip Van Winkle, are elaborations with pictorial intent rather than
dramas with culminative movement and sharp outlines. They are essays rather than short stories.
Irving advanced the short story more by his influence than by his art. The popularity of The Sketch Book and the
others that followed it, the tremendous fact of their authors European fame, the alluring pictures of lands across the
sea, the romantic atmosphere, the vagueness and the wonder of it, laid hold mightily upon the imagination of America.
They came just in time to capture the young group of writers that was to rule the mid-century. The twenties and the
thirties in America were dominated by The Sketch Book. All at once came an outburst of Irvingesque sketches and
tales. That the unit of measure in American fiction is a short one is to be accounted for in a very great degree by the
tremendous influence of Irving in its early formative period.
4. The Annuals; Hawthorne.
For the new form there sprang up in the twenties a new vehicle, the annual. For two decades the book-stands were loaded
with flamboyantly bound gift booksThe Token, The Talisman, The Pearl, The Amaranth, and the others,
elaborate Sketch Books varied soon by echoes from the new romanticism of Europe. Never before such a gushing of
sentiment, of mawkish pathos, of crude terror effects, and vague Germanic mysticism. From out of it all but a single
figure has survived, the sombre Hawthorne 2 who was genius enough to turn even the stuff of the annuals into a form
that was to persist and dominate. Hawthorne added soul to the short story and made it a form that could be taken seriously
even by those who had contended that it was inferior to the longer forms of fiction. He centred his effort about a single
situation and gave to the whole tale unity of impression. Instead of elaboration of detail, suggestion; instead of picturings

of external effects, subjective analysis and psychologic delineation of character. Hawthorne was the first to lift the short
story into the higher realms of art.
5. Poe; Realism.
The forties belong to Poe. 3 With him came for the first time the science of the short story, the treatment of it as a 7
distinct art form with its own rules and its own fields. Laws the form was bound to have if it was to persist. As the
century progressed and as modern science swept from mens minds the vague and the generalizing and the
disorderly, there came necessarily the demand for more reality, for sharper outlines, for greater attention to logical
order. The modern short story is but the fiction natural, and indeed inevitable, in a scientific age, and Poe was the
first to perceive the new tendency and to formulate its laws.
He did not work in the deeps of the human heart like Hawthorne; he was an artist and only an artist, and even in his 11
art he did not advance further than to formulate the best short story technique of his day. His tales are not to be
classified at all with the products of later art. They lack sharpness of outline, finesse, and that sense of reality which
makes of a tale an actual piece of human life. His creations are tours de force; they reflect no earthly soil, they are
weak in characterization and their dialogueas witness the conversation of the negroes in The Gold Bugis
wooden and lifeless. Poe was a critic, keenly observant of the tendencies of his day, sensitive to literary values,
scientific, with powers of analysis that amounted to genius. He was not the creator of the short story; he was the first
to feel the new demand of his age and to forecast the new art and formulate its laws.
In the realm of the short story Poe was a prophet, peering into the next age, rather than a leader of his own time. 12
Until later years his influence was small. He had applied his new art to the old sensational material of the thirties
old wine in new bottles.
The decline of the old type of story explains why Hawthorne turned to the production of long romances. The age of 13
the Hawthornesque short story had passed. With the fifties had come a new atmosphere. To realize it one has but to
read for a time in Godeys Ladys Book andGrahams Magazine and the annuals and then to turn to Harpers
Magazine, established in 1850, Putnams Magazine, in 1853, and The Atlantic Monthly, in 1857.
6. Rose Terry Cooke.
The first significant figure of the transition was Rose Terry (182792), later better known as Rose Terry Cooke, who has
the distinction of having contributed seven short stories to the first eight numbers of the Atlantic.
7. OBrien.
Rose Terry came gradually, an evolution, without noise or sensation; not so Fitz-James OBrien (182862), who, after
his The Diamond Lens (January, 1858), was hailed loudly as a new Poe. OBrien added the sense of actuality to Poes
unlocalized romance, but his influence was not large.
8. Hale.
Another figure in the transition was Edward Everett Hale 4 (18221909), whose The Man without a Country, first
published in 1863, has been accepted generally as an American classic. A story like My Double and how he Undid me is
manifestly a tour de force, yet one is in danger of gravely accepting it as a fact. Hale added to the short story not alone the
sense of reality; he added plausibility as well.
9. Henry James.
With Henry James 5 the period of transition came to an end. From 1865, when he published his first story, until 1875, the
date of Roderick Hudson, he devoted himself to short fiction, contributing fourteen stories to the Atlantic alone, and he
brought to his work not only the best art America had evolved, but the best of England and France as well. With James the
short story became an art form simply, cold and brilliant, a study of the surface of society, manners, endless phenomena
jotted down in a note-book, human life from the standpoint of the laboratory and the test tube.
10. Bret Harte.
Francis Bret Harte 6 was born in 1839 at Albany, where his father, a scholar and an itinerant teacher of languages,
happened at the time to be stationed. A youth of frail physique, he became a precocious reader, preferring a Hawthornelike seclusion among books to playground activities among boys of his own age.
Bret Hartes The Luck of Roaring Camp, whatever one may think of its merits, must be admitted to be the most influential
short story ever written in America.

 12. Constance Fenimore Woolson.

Perhaps the most interesting transition during the period is that which may be traced in the work of Constance Fenimore
Woolson (183894), a grandniece of Cooper, a native of New Hampshire, and a dweller successively by the Great Lakes,
in the South, and in Italy, where she died. Stories like her The Front Yard are constructed of the materials of life itself.
One cannot forget them.
13. Sarah Orne Jewett.
A transition from another source is to be found in the stories of Sarah Orne Jewett (18491909), who also stands on the
border line between the real and the romantic. She was affected not at all by Harte, but by Mrs. Stowe and Rose Terry
Cooke.
20. The Eighties.
With the eighties the short story came in America fully to its own. Up to 1884 it had generally been regarded as a
magazine form, a rather trivial thing as compared with the stately novel. Beginning in 1884, however, collections more
and more began to dominate the output of fiction.
21. Charles Egbert Craddock.
1884 was the climactic year in the history of the short story inasmuch as it produced The Lady or the Tiger? and In the
Tennessee Mountains, each one of them a literary sensation that advertised the form tremendously.
26. The Latest Period.
Beginning about 1898 with the early work of O. Henry and Jack London, there has come what may be called the last
period in the history of the short storythe work of the present day. It is the period of magazines devoted wholly to short
stories, of syndicates which handle little else, of text books and college courses on the art of the short story, and even of
correspondence courses in which the art of making marketable stories may be learned through the mails. In America the
short story seems to have become an obsession.

l8l5 -- The North American Review established. l8l9 -- Washington Irving's The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.
published serially in the United States, and in volume form (l820) in England.
l82l -- The Saturday Evening Post established. l822 -- Irving's Bracebridge Hall: or, The Humorists published in England.
l824 -- Irving's Tales of a Traveller published in England.
l830-2 -- Nathaniel Hawthorne's earliest tales ("Provincial Tales" and "Seven Tales of My Native Land") published
individually in Token, Salem Gazette, and Atlantic Souvenir.
l832 -- Edgar Allan Poe's first tale ("Metzengerstein") published in the Philadelphia Saturday Courier.
l833 -- William Gilmore Simms' The Book of My Lady published in Philadelphia.
l833-5 -- Hawthorne's "The Story Teller" published piecemeal in New England Magazine. Augustus B.
Longstreet's Georgia Scenes published in Augusta, Georgia (1835).
l836-8 -- Poe edits Southern Literary Messenger, reviews short fiction (inc. Longstreet).
l837 -- Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales published in Boston.
l840 -- Poe's Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque published by Lea & Blanchard; The Dial est. by Poe.

l865 -- The Nation established; Mark Twain's "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" published in the New
York Saturday Press; published with other stories in l867.
l868 -- Bret Harte's "The Luck of Roaring Camp" appears in the August Overland Monthly.
l869 -- Harte's "The Outcasts of Poker Flat" appears in January Overland Monthly, after which Harte moves to Boston to
be a contributing editor for Atlantic Monthly; his stories are collected in Sandy Bar, & Co. (l873).