Introduction: The Oxford Book of

American Short StoriesIntroduction: The

Oxford Book of American Short Stories
By Joyce Carol Oates
Originally published in The Oxford Book of American Short Stories, 1st ed.

Familiar names, unfamiliar titles: this, in part, was my initial inspiration in

assembling The Oxford Book of American Short Stories. The challenge was to
discover, wherever possible, short stories by our finest writers that were less
known than the stories by these writers usually found in anthologies, yet of
equal merit and interest; stories that, while reflecting authors characteristic
styles, visions, and subjects, suggested other aspects of sensibility. We
Americans are justly proud of our literature, and a good deal of that pride stems
from our awareness of the crucial role of the short storyin its earliest
manifestations, the short tale or romanceas a form ideally suited to the
expression of the imagination.

In my reading of many months I was enormously pleased to discover virtually unknown yet
fascinating work by certain of our classic American writers, whose famous titles recur from
anthology to anthology with dismaying predictability. Certainly, Nathaniel Hawthornes
Young Goodman Brown and The Birthmark are brilliant moral parablesbut what of the
more psychologically realistic The Wives of the Dead, of which no one seems to have
heard? Melvilles Bartleby the Scrivener has entered our literary consciousness,
deservedly, but what of The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids, with its
eerily contemporary theme of sexual/class exploitation? (I first read this unclassifiable
prose piece hardly a tale in any conventional sense, still less a storywhen I was an
undergraduate at Syracuse University, and I have been haunted by its images ever since.
Herman Melville, our first native feminist?can it be so?) Henry Jamess aesthetic is
nowhere more perfectly realized than in The Beast in the Jungle, anthologized virtually
everywhere; yet what of The Middle Years, so much more direct, more human, more
personal in its statement of the isolates (or the artists) life? It is in this lesser-known story
that The Master speaks with painful candor, giving voice to what all artists know, yet
perhaps would not want to express in such raw, unmediated terms:

We work in the darkwe do what we canwe give what we have. Our doubt is our
passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.

As schoolchildren we read and admired Mark Twains early, frankly derivative tall tale, The
Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, but the darker, more sinister, yes and
funnier Twain, as represented in the mordant Cannibalism in the Cars, is virtually
unknown. (And why, in most general anthologies, is there no representation at all of
Twains great contemporary Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose popularity as a writer was by no
means confined to her most famous work, Uncle Toms Cabin?) So too with such familiar
classics as Stephen Cranes The Open Boat, Jack Londons To Build a Fire, Edith
Whartons Roman Fever, Hemingways The Snows of Kilimanjaro and The Short Happy
Life of Francis Macomber, Willa Cathers Pauls Case, William Carlos Williams The Use
of Force. These are certainly great works of art, at the very least, they have helped to
define the range and depth of the short story in America. But the reader begins to feel
frustration when they are encountered repeatedly, alternated now and then with a very few
other titles of almost equal familiarity. Though among them F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eudora
Welty, Flannery OConnor, Saul Bellow, John Cheever, Peter Taylor, and John Updike
have written literally hundreds of short stories, the same two or three titles by each writer
are recycled continuously. Why, given such plenitude, is this so? Do editors of anthologies
consult only other anthologies, instead of reading original collections of stories? But isnt
the implicit promise of an anthology that it will, or aspires to, present something different,
unexpected?

How ironic, it seemed to me, yet, perhaps, how symbolic, that in our age of rapid mass-
production and the easy proliferation of consumer products, the richness and diversity of
the American literary imagination should be so misrepresented in most anthologies and
textbooks!

Of course, I must confess that, despite months of reading and rereading, I could not avoid
reprinting certain very familiar favorites. Washington Irvings Rip Van Winkle, Edgar Allan
Poes The Tell-Tale Heart, Charlotte Perkins Gilmans The Yellow Wallpaper, Ernest
Hemingways A Clean, Well Lighted Place, William Faulkners That Evening Sunthe
consequence of an ideal conjunction of quality of prose and quantity of pages. (All
anthologies are compromises when a finitude of space is an issue.) James Baldwins and
Ralph Ellisons much-reprinted Sonnys Blues and Battle Royal are works by major
American writers who did not cultivate the short story form, and so offer very few titles.
Other old favorites which the scanning eye will note as absentRing Lardners Haircut,
James Thurbers The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, Shirley Jacksons The Lotterywere
reluctantly excluded because they are so readily available elsewhere, and because, with
space restrictions, I thought it more important to present outstanding titles by writers
representing a broad spectrum of cultural traditions: Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Jean
Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Paul Bowles, Leslie Marmon Silko, Bharati
Mukherjee, Amy Tan, David Leavitt, Sandra Cisneros, to name but a few.

No creative writer can swallow another contemporary, Virginia Woolf once noted, as a
way, perhaps, of rationalizing her own highly subjective tastes, the reception of living
work is too coarse and partial if youre doing the same thing yourself. Even if one is not
doing the same thing oneself, or anything approaching it, there remains an obvious
difficulty in attempting an overview of the very landscape one inhabits.

As we move through the post-War era and into contemporary times, the proliferation of
published stories and the immense diversities of talent make selection enormously difficult.
What riches here, and what sorrow for the editor in having to exclude so much! Here
indeed is American plenitudenot solely of talent but of distinct aesthetic agendas; distinct
ethnic and minority voices; distinct regional themes. It will be evident that, beginning with
Harriet Beecher Stowe, I have sought to include more women writers than commonly
appear in such volumes; yet, in the past two decades, so many outstanding women writers
have emerged, and are emerging still, often as ethnic voices, that a proportional
representation of their work, in such limited space, is all but impossible. Ethnic and minority
fiction has revitalized our contemporary literature and constitutes, it might be argued, a new
regionalism. (Or is American literature at its core a literature of regions? Note how In this
volume, works by contemporaries so seemingly diverse as John Edgar Wideman and
Sandra Cisneros, Eudora Welty and Saul Bellow, Leslie Silko, Louise Erdrich, and Bobbie
Ann Mason, as well as John Updike, Peter Taylor, and John Cheever, are related along
lines that have less to do with traditional American themes than with stories set in highly
specific, brilliantly realized American places. Indeed, in writers so clearly linked to an
idiomatic oral tradition as Flannery OConnor and the young West Virginian Pinckney
Benedict, place is voice.)
Because my emphasis in this anthology is on storytelling, often with a social and/or political
theme, and not on literary experimentation, I have included, of the celebrated meta-
fictionalists of the 1960s and 1970s, only Donald Barthelme, whose principal mode of
fiction was the short story. Had I more space, I would have wished to include such
dazzlingly inventive talents as John Barth, William Gass, John Hawkes, Robert Coover,
Paul West, and Steven Millhauser, among others. Of writers associated with gender, I have
included only David Leavitt, whose most representative fiction, though generally concerned
with young gay Caucasian men of an educated middle class, transcends any labels; of the
controversial minimalists of recent years, I have included only Raymond Carver, Bobbie
Ann Mason, and Tobias Wolffwith the immediate qualification, which I assert with some
urgency, that I, personally, do not consider these writers minimalists any more than
Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, and William Carlos Williams are minimalists.
Even to classify them as realists is reductive and misleading.

Other editors have remarked in print of a problem arguably unique to our time and nation,
of the proliferation of published stories by serious, committed, highly gifted writers who are
carving out careers for themselves that will, in time, not only rest upon a few distinguished
works but upon solid bodies of work, which will, in turn, help to define our increasingly
diversified and heterogeneous American literature. Obviously, I could include only a
sampling of this richness. To do justice to the remarkable fecundity of the American short
story would require not a single volume of this size, but a second.

Not that the story need be long,

but it will take a long while
to make it short.

Henry David Thoreau

Formal definitions of the short story are commonplace, yet there is none quite democratic
enough to accommodate an art that includes so much variety and an art that so readily
lends itself to experimentation and idiosyncratic voices. Perhaps length alone should be the
sole criterion? Whenever critics try to impose other, more subjective strictures on the genre
(as on any genre) too much work is excluded.

Yet length itself is problematic. No more than 10,000 words? Why not then 10,500?
11,000? Where, in fact, does a short story end and a novella begin? (Tolstoys The Death
of Ivan Ilych can be classified as both.) And there is the reverse problem, for, as short
stories condense, they are equally difficult to define. What is the short-short story,
precisely? What is that most teasing of prose works, the prose-poem? We can be guided
by critical intuition in distinguishing between a newspaper article or an anecdote and a fully
realized story, but intuition is notoriously difficult to define (or depend upon). Since the
cultivation of the aesthetically subtle minimally resolved short story by such masters as
Chekhov, Lawrence, Joyce, and Hemingway, the definition of the fully realized story has
become problematic as well.

My personal definition of the form is that it represents a concentration of imagination, and

not an expansion, it is no more than 10,000 words; and, no matter its mysteries or
experimental properties, it achieves closuremeaning that, when it ends, the attentive
reader understand why.

That is to say, the short story is a prose piece that is not a mere concatenation of events,
as in a news account or an anecdote, but an intensification of meaning by way of events.
Its plot may be wholly interior, seemingly static, a matter of the progression of a
characters thought. Its resolution need not be a formally articulated statement, as in many
of Hawthornes more didactic tales, or, in this collection, William Austins once-famous
cautionary tale Peter Rugg, the Missing Man, but it signals a tangible change of some
sort; a distinct shift in consciousness, a deepening of insight. In the most elliptical of stories,
a characteristic of the modern and contemporary story, the actual resolution frequently
occurs in the readers, and not the fictional characters, consciousness. To read stories as
disparate as Katherine Anne Porters He, Paul Bowless A Distant Episode, Ray
Bradburys There Will Come Soft Rains, Raymond Carvers Are These Actual Miles?
and Tobias Wolffs Hunters in the Snow, among others in this volume, is to read stories so
structured as to provide the reader, and not the characters themselves, with insight.
Because the meaning of a story does not lie on its surface, visible and self-defining, does
not mean that meaning does not exist. Indeed, the ambiguity of meaning, its inner, private
quality, may well be part of the writers vision.

In addition to these qualities, most short stories (but hardly all) are restricted in time and
place; concentrate upon a very small number of characters; and move toward a single
ascending dramatic scene or revelation. And all are generated by conflict.

The artist is the focal point of conflict. Lovers of pristine harmony, those who dislike being
upset, shocked, made to think and to feel, are not naturally suited to appreciate art, at least
not serious art, which, unlike television dramas and situation comedies, for instance, does
not evoke conflict merely to solve it within a brief space of time. Rather, conflict is the
implicit subject, itself; as conflict, the establishment of disequilibrium, is the impetus for the
evolution of life, so is conflict the genesis, the prime mover, the secret heart of all art.

Discord, then, and not harmony, is the subject our writers share in common. Though the
quelling of discord and the re-establishment of harmony may well be the point of the art.

The literary short story, the meticulously constructed short story, descends to us by way
of the phenomenon of magazine publication, beginning in the nineteenth century, but has
as its ancestor the oral tale.

We must assume that storytelling is as old as mankind, at least as old as spoken language.
Reality is not enough for uswe crave the imaginations embellishments upon it. In the
beginning. Once upon a time. A long time ago there lived a princess who. How the pulse
quickens, hearing such beginnings! such promises of something new, strange, unexpected!
The epic poem, the ballad, the parable, the beast-fable, sacred narratives, visionary
prophecies the fabulous mythopoetic histories of ancient culturesthe divinely
inspired books of the Old and New Testament: all are forms of storytelling, expressions of
the human imagination.

Like a river fed by countless small streams, the modern short story derives from a
multiplicity of sources. Historically, the earliest literary documents of which we have
knowledge are Egyptian papyri dating from 4000-3000 B.C., containing a work called, most
intriguingly, Tales of the Magicians. The Middle Ages revered such secular works as
fabliaux, ballads, and verse romances; the Arabian Thousand and One Nights and the Latin
tales and anecdotes of the Gesta Romanorum, collected before the end of the thirteenth
century, as well as the one hundred tales of Boccaccios The Decameron, and
Chaucers Canterbury Tales, were enormously popular for centuries. Storytelling as an oral
art, like the folk ballad, was or is, characteristic of non-literate cultures, for obvious reasons.
Even the prolongation of light (by artificial means) had an effect upon the storytelling
tradition of our ancestors. The rise in literacy marked the ebbing of interest in old fairy tales
and ballads, as did the gradual stabilization of languages and the cessation of local dialects
in which the tales and ballads had been told most effectively. (The Brothers Grimm noted
this phenomenon: if, in High German, a fairy tale gained in superficial clarity, it lost in
flavor, and no longer had such a firm hold of the kernel of meaning.)

One of the signal accomplishments of American literature, most famously exemplified by

the great commercial and critical success of Samuel Clemens, is the reclamation of that
lost flavorthe use, as style, of dialect, regional, and strongly (often comically) vernacular
language. Of course, before Samuel Clemens cultivated the ingenuous-ironic persona of
Mark Twain, there were dialect writers and tale-tellers in America (for instance, Joel
Chandler Harris, creator of the popular Uncle Remus stories); but Mark Twain was a
phenomenon of a kind previously unknown hereour first American writer to be avidly
read, coast to coast, by all classes of Americans, from the most high-born to the least
cultured and minimally literate. The development of mass-market newspapers and
subscription book sales made this success possible, but it was the brilliant reclamation of
the vernacular in Twains work (the early The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras
County, for instance) that made him into so uniquely American a writer, our counterpart to
Dickens.

Twains rapid ascent was by way of popular newspapers, which syndicated features coast
to coast, and his crowd-pleasing public performances but the more typical outlet for a short
story writer particularly of self-consciously literary work, was the magazine. Virtually every
writer in this volume, from Washington Irving and Nathaniel Hawthorne onward, began his
or her career publishing short fiction in magazines before moving on to book publication; in
the nineteenth century, such highly regarded, and, in some cases, high-paying magazines
as The North American Review, Harpers Monthly, Atlantic Monthly, Scribners
Monthly (later The Century), The Dial, and Grahams Magazine (briefly edited by Edgar
Allan Poe) advanced the careers of writers who would otherwise have had financial
difficulties in establishing themselves. In postWorld War II America, the majority of short
story writers publish in small-circulation literary magazines throughout their careers. It is
all but unknown for a writer to publish a book of short stories without having published most
of them in magazines beforehand.

Edgar Allan Poes famous review-essay of Hawthornes Twice-Told Tales (Grahams

Magazine, 1842) is justly celebrated as one of the crucial documents in the establishment
of the short story as a distinct literary genre. Poes aesthetic is a curious admixture of the
romantic and the classic: the intention of the art-work is to move the readers soul deeply,
but the means to this intention is coolly, if not chillingly, cerebral. Poe in his philosophy as
in his practice is both visionary and manipulator:

A skillful literary artist has constructed his tale. If wise, he has not fashioned his thoughts to
accommodate his incidents; but having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or
single effect to be wrought out, he then invents such incidentshe then combines such
events as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect.

Magazine publication is the ideal outlet for Poes hypothesized tale, where works requiring
from a half-hour to one or two hours in [their] perusal appeared. Indeed, the emphasis in
Poes review essay is on the readers experience of the work, and not upon the work itself;
as ifcan this be genius speaking? in the very language of the hack?it scarcely
matters what has been written, only that it has been written to a certain pre-conceived
effect. (It should be noted too, and not incidentally, that Poe was a man of vast literary
ambitions, and not simply, or not exclusively, a tormented Romantic driven to the
composition of uncanny poetry and prose: he wrote for magazines, and he edited
magazines, and it was his professional obsession from 1836 to his death in 1849 to found
and edit a magazine, to be called Penn Magazine.)

As the literary short story derives from the oral tale, so, in Poes aesthetic the meticulously
constructed short story relates to the poem. While the highest genius, arguably, is best
employed in poetry (not to exceed in length what might be perused in an hour), the
loftiest talent may turn to the prose tale, as exemplified by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Poe
elevates the prose tale above much of poetry, in fact, and above the novel, for poetry
brings the reader to too high a pitch of excitement to be sustained, and the novel is
objectionable because of its undue length. By contrast, the brief tale enables the writer to
carry out the fullness of his intention. . . During the hour of perusal the soul of the reader is
at the writers control. There are no external or extrinsic influencesresulting from
weariness or interruption.

In Poes somewhat Aristotelian terms, the secret of the short storys composition is its unity.
Yet, within this, as within a well made play, a multiplicity of modes or inflections of thought
and expressionthe ratiocinative, for example, the sarcastic, or the humorousare
available to the writer, as they are not available, apparently, to the poet. This concept,
dogmatic even for its time relates only incidentally to the stories Poe himself wrote, but
provides an aesthetic anticipating the work of such masters of the genre as Chekhov,
Joyce, Henry James, and Hemingway, in which everything is excluded that does not
contribute to the general effect, or design, of the story. (Like most critics who are also
artists Poe was formulating an aesthetic to accommodate his own practice and his own
limitations. Temperamentally, Poe was probably incapable of the sustained effort of the
novelist; this helps to explain his envious disparagement of Charles Dickens, who, for all
his apparent flaws in Poes judgment, enjoyed the enormous popular success denied to
Poe during his own lifetime.)

The American short story, however, has had no more thoughtful, visionary, and influential
an early critic than Poe, just as the history of the short story itself in America is bound up
with the unique work Poe published in 1840, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque.

A predominant vein connecting the majority of the stories in this volume from Washington
Irving and William Austin through to our contemporaries, is the quest, in some cases a
distinctly American quest, for ones place in the world; ones cultural and spiritual identity, in
terms of self and others.

For ours is the nation, so rare in human history, of self-determination; a theoretical

experiment in newness, exploration, discovery. In theory at least, who our ancestors have
been, what languages they have spoken, in what religions they believedthese factors
cannot really help to define us. And it has been often noted that, in the New World, history
itself has moved with extraordinary rapidity. Each generation constitutes a beginning-again,
a new discovery, sometimes of language itself.

Washington Irving, who begins most volumes of American short fiction, was, in much of his
work, a chronicler of tumultuous political change. Though English-oriented in his education,
and immensely influenced by eighteenth-century English writers of the didactic and satirical
sort, Irvings genius was to appropriate, in his most famous tales, a theme out of folklore:
the comedy of the dislocated citizen, who, visited by the supernatural, ends up not knowing
who he is. In Rip Van Winkle, the theme is brilliantly applied to the hapless Rip who falls
asleep in colonial America and wakes in post-Revolutionary America: waking to an
irrevocably altered world.

Irving was born in 1783, at the end of the American Revolution. But, like Hawthorne, he
derived great imaginative inspiration from the history of the region in which he lived. Not
Irvings contemporary America, that vital, seething young nation, but Colonial America, in
the quaintly sequestered world of the Kaatskill Mountains, is the setting for the robustly tall
tale Rip Van Winkle, a parable of dislocation. Rip, a descendant of Dutch settlers of the
early eighteenth century, falls into an enchanted sleep, and, when he wakes, finds himself
in post-Revolutionary America, where, to his astonishment, a new political language is
spoken. The likeness of old King George has been metamorphosed into a dapper military
portrait of someone called General Washington; Rip is no longer a subject of British rule,
but a free citizen of the United States which means nothing to him. It is a concept
simply beyond his comprehension, as, Irving suggests, it is a concept beyond the
comprehension of many citizens who had lived through the Revolution but were incapable
of revolutionizing themselves. So, too, perhaps with the majority of men and women, in
periods of violent social upheaval?
Where Irvings tone is jocular, tongue-in-cheek, William Austins is grimly serious in his
parable of Peter Rugg, the Missing Man. Here, the enchantment is clearly a curse, and
Peter Rugg is a Flying Dutchman of sorts, doomed to ceaseless motion. Austin may have
intended his archetypal hero to represent a newer species of mana lost manan
atheistwho utters an oath that offends God, thus sealing his doom. Like certain of
Hawthornes similarly accursed heroes Rugg is dislocated yet more radically than Rip Van
Winkle. To Rugg, the new generation of Bostonians are his enemies, and his home, his
family, his very identity have been stripped from him. (Compare the equally desperate fate
of the elderly Major Molineux in Hawthornes My Kinsman, Major Molineux. )

Another aspect of identity, that of gendered fate, at least as linked with the vicissitudes of
social class, is taken up, with characteristic irony, by Melville in his linked sexual allegories
The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids. The vision of sexual determinism
for the working-class female, her doomstrikes us as disturbingly contemporary. (Melville,
in his great, brooding, idiosyncratic prose works, is always our contemporary.) How like the
nightmare fate of Charlotte Perkins Gilmans heroine, trapped in her femaleness as in the
yellow wallpaper of her confinement these young factory workers: blank-looking girls, with
blank, white folders in blank hands, blankly folding blank paper. Biological destiny and the
position of the individual in a burgeoning industrial society are memorably linked, in
Melvilles vision of hell where Cupid himself is an overseer, and where the production of
blank white soulless pulp is an image of the blanknessand inevitabilityof human
reproduction. Melvilles protagonist-observer becomes spellboundWhat made the thing I
saw so specially terrible to me was the metallic necessity, the unbudging fatality which
governed it. Only Herman Melville could have fashioned out of real events (his visits to a
gentlemans club in London and to a paper-mill factory in Dalton, Massachusetts) such
harrowing and dreamlike allegorical fiction.

By Poes criteria, The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids is perhaps not a
successful tale, lacking unity. Yet it is as horrific an image of mans (and womans) fate as
Poe himself created.

Questions of sexual and racial identity are taken up in more realistic terms by writers of
subsequent generations, like Charles W. Chesnutt (whose The Sheriffs Children
anticipates the obsessive father-son theme of Langston Hughes work), Mary E. Wilkins
Freeman (whose Old Woman Magoun anticipates radical feminist texts of our time), and
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (whose The Yellow Wallpaper, a Poe-inspired narration of lyric
madness, has become in fact a celebrated feminist text of our time). Edith Whartons
unusually frank A Journey is a naturalistic allegory dramatizing a young wifes experience
of her husbands dying; her resentment and terror of the burden his very body represents to
her in deathas if she, yearning to live, will be stigmatized by his death, forced to
disembark prematurely from the train (of life?). A similar moment of crisis is experienced
and transcendedby the hysterically repressed Presbyterian minister of Sherwood
Andersons The Strength of God (from Winesburg, Ohio): God has appeared to me, the
minister announces, in the person of Kate Swift, the school teacher, kneeling naked on a
bed.

Arguably, most African-American writing is about racial identity: black cohesiveness and
dispersion in a rapidly industrialized country; black experience (suffering, resignation,
rebellion, rage, accommodation, integration, self-determination) in the face of historical
white oppression. In broad theoretical images, the white fathers black sonthe
unacknowledged progeny of the white master is an emblem of the misbegotten and the
rejected who returns as a powerful threat. The Jesus of William Faulkners That Evening
Sun is a bitter sort of savior; the degraded black man, the probable son of slaves, who
revenges himself against the only victim available to him in his powerlessnessthe black
woman who is his wife. Faulkners depiction of this tragedy is the more wrenching in that it
is told to us obliquely, through the chattering and arguing of a self-absorbed white
Mississippian family.
Striking a distinctly ominous note is Richard Wrights The Man Who Was Almost a Man
(the black youth who is almost a murderer, and on his way to being one)a story
disturbing to white readers as the authors controversial Native Son, one of the seminal
novels of black American experience. The young black men of Jean Toomers Blood-
Burning Moon and Ralph Ellisons Battle Royal inhabit a society divided along
indisputably racist lines; Eudora Weltys Where Is the Voice Coming From? presents a
deranged white murderer, the very voice of a retrograde Southern society of the 1960s.
Only James Baldwins Sonnys Blues ends with an image of transcendence and hope,
however painfully won: Then they all gathered around Sonny, and Sonny played.
Sonnys fingers filled the air with life, his life. But that life contained so many others. In a
contemporary story by John Edgar Wideman, Fever, blackness itself is perceived by
whites as a contagion evil incarnateyet acquires a purposeful strength, the strength of
bitterness, cunning, ironic detachment.

Among those writers with whom we associate literary Modernism (Ernest Hemingway, for
instance) and those writers who are our contemporaries, questions of identity have become
all-absorbing. The quintessential Hemingway hero is a paradigm for the hero (or heroine) of
much twentieth-century fiction, whose predicament is: once one has stripped oneself of
superfluities of identity, what remains? The terror of night.?nothingness? Our nada who
art in nada, nada be thy name, is the prayer of A Clean, Well-Lighted Placeas if God
were nothing, and nothingness is God. Scott Fitzgeralds cartoonisthero of the painfully
autobiographical An Alcoholic Case looks into a corner of the hotel bathroom and sees
death awaiting him: and nothing more. Perhaps the most extreme (and unforgettable)
image of twentieth-century existential dislocation is the brutalized, tongueless American
professor (of linguistics) of Paul Bowless nightmare parable, A Distant Episode.

In our contemporaries, the burden of history and politics as personal fate, weighing, at
times, almost physically upon the shoulders of survivors and descendants, is dramatized in
stories encompassing a wide range of subject matter, style, and visionfrom Flannery
OConnors mordant A Late Encounter with the Enemy (an aged Civil War veterans
hallucinatory descent into death and into his identity) to Bernard Malamuds My Son the
Murderer (generational conflict in the radicalized, despairing Sixties) Louise Erdrichs
Fleur (a Native American witch resists the fate that would make her a victim) and Bharati
Mukherjees The Management of Grief (the surviving member of a Hindu family killed in a
terrorist bombing detaches herself, through pain, from the paralysis of grief). The elliptical,
poetic tales of Sandra Cisneros and the seemingly forthright, conversational Two Kinds by
Amy Tan take for granted a dominant Caucasian world outside the familyhere, such
abstractions as history and politics are realized in the experience of sensitive, yet
representative, adolescent girls.

Meticulous chroniclers of lives less dramatically touched by history, though yet distinctly,
often disturbingly American, are such writers as John Cheever, John Updike, Alice Adams,
Ursula Le Guin, Raymond Carver, among others, who have taken for their subjects the
lives (and what radically differing lives, told in what radically differing voices) of what might
be called mainstream Americans of the Caucasian middle class. What these writers share
is their artistry; their commitment to the short story; their faith in the imaginative
reconstruction of reality that constitutes literature.

As Tolstoy said, talent is the capacity to direct concentrated attention upon the subject: the
gift of seeing what others have not seen.

Though it is hardly necessary, I suggest that the reader read this volume as it is
assembled, more or less chronologically. A tale will unfold, by way of numerous tales, that
is uniquely and wonderfully American