The history of the short story in mid-twentieth century America continues to be marked by a tension between the twin fictional poles of realism and romance, the story of accurate ‘reportage’ and the story of fantasy and imagination. The short story also encourages, and can accommodate in particular ways, a reflexive self-consciousness about literary form, a propensity to build into the story a commentary on itself. The closeness of the typical length of the short story to that of the essay, and the relationship of story to essay through the sketch, which shares features of both, also influences the short story's tendency towards self-reflection and a mingling of genres and registers.

In the twentieth century we can see the beginnings of an anti-realist playfulness in O. Henry. Sherwood Anderson's stories often accentuate the grotesque beyond the boundaries of realist report. Flannery O'Connor's tales, for all their compelling realism of detail and surface, relentlessly press their plots and characters towards the extreme revelations of transcendent parable. One of the most famous New Yorker stories by Shirley Jackson, ‘The Lottery’, is a tour de force of bland suburban realism suddenly shifting almost imperceptibly into an enigmatic fantasy in which social orthodoxy involves inhuman sacrificial violence. As we have seen, even a chronicler of contemporary suburban mores like Cheever often allows his imagination to lift his stories beyond the everyday into regions that border the surreal.

Ernest Hemingway is the foremost American writer of the short story in the first half of the twentieth century, and while he is also a novelist of repute with some four major novels to his name, many critics have felt that as an artist and innovator his most outstanding work lies in his short stories. His famous prose style – plain words, simple but artfully structured syntax, the direct presentation of the object – lends itself particularly to small-scale, concentrated effects. And his subject matter – the fragmentary nature of modern life, with its small local victories and defeats, its focus on the present moment and its prevailing mood of disillusion – also seems to fall naturally into those short forms which deal with glimpse, crisis, turning point and representative episode. If O. Henry is an American vaudeville version of Maupassant, Hemingway can be seen as the successor of Chekhov and Turgenev: he much admired the stories and sketches of the latter, as did Sherwood Anderson. But he was a more disciplined stylist than Anderson, and in his short stories can also be seen as the prose equivalent of Imagist poetry, of which he became aware in the 1920s through his association with modernists like Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. At the same time the personal experience on which he frequently drew directly in his writing was full of confusing tension and conflict – between masculine and feminine elements in his personality, between admiration for physical courage and a growing disillusion with violence, and between the optimism of youth and physical energy, and the inevitable depredations of old age and death.

One strain of the African American short story has its pre-literary roots in a rich tradition of oral tales deriving from the earliest days of slavery. Humorous animal trickster fables about figures like Brer Rabbit, Brer Coon and Brer Terrapin, stories of magical Africans, of conjure figures (magicians who cast spells on others), or of clever slaves who tricked their masters, were all numerous in the Southern and South-Western states, and began to be collected by folklorists and historians towards the end of the nineteenth century. ‘When Brer Deer and Brer Terrapin Runned a Race’, for example, tells of how Brer Terrapin despite his slowness wins the seven-mile race along the river bank to decide who will win the hand of Mr Coon's daughter. He puts one of his brothers at every mile-post and at the finishing post, and each time Brer Deer arrives at a post a brother puts his head out of the water and says ‘Oho, here I is!’ A conjure story from Eatonville, Florida, collected by the African American writer Zora Neale Hurston, tells of how Aunt Judy puts a particularly unpleasant spell on the dandy and womanizer Horace Carter to stop him chasing after women. In one very short example of the ‘clever slave’ stories about John and his Master, known as ‘Baby in the Crib’, John steals a pig and disguises it as a baby; and when ‘Old Marsa’ insists on seeing it John says: ‘If that baby is turned into a pig now, don't blame me.’

The great popularity and at the same time the critical esteem of the short story in the early part of the twentieth century is nowhere more evident than in the short stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940), and the tension between the popular and the estimable – the two not always at odds, but often pulling in different directions – is at the heart of his work. Fitzgerald published four major volumes of short stories during his lifetime: Flappers and Philosophers (1920), Tales of the Jazz Age (1922), All the Sad Young Men (1926) and Taps at Reveille (1935). Most of these stories, together with many others, were also published initially in the magazines – most notably the popular Saturday Evening Post and the more seriously literary Scribner's. None of his short story collections as a whole is as significant as his achievement in the genre of the novel, particularly his masterpiece The Great Gatsby (1925), but the best of them, which would include ‘The Diamond as Big as the Ritz’, ‘The Rich Boy’, ‘May Day’, ‘Absolution’ and ‘Babylon Revisited’, show both the romantic verve and élan and the counter-romantic critical edge of his best writing and gave him the opportunity to add a number of brilliant facets to his treatment of the American scene.

Fitzgerald rarely had anything good to say on behalf of his short stories.

Bret Harte

Until the second half of the nineteenth century, and even beyond, the cultural identity of the United States was dominated by the East Coast. Hawthorne was part (albeit a detached part) of the Boston literary society which constituted the most powerful cultural grouping. Irving was a New York writer whose chosen literary territory was the Hudson valley, while Melville was born in New York City, settled for a time in Massachusetts and then moved again in 1863 to New York City, where he stayed for the rest of his life. Poe spent most of his early life in Richmond, Virginia, adopted something of the style and social aspirations of a Southern gentleman, and later lived in Philadelphia and New York City.

But from the middle decades of the century the West, hitherto mainly populated by Native Americans and immigrant Spanish colonialists, began to be opened up by Americans of English origin. In 1848 gold was discovered in California, and the gold-rush began that increased the non-Native population of California from around 14,000 to over 250,000 by 1852. In 1860, a young staff writer on the San Francisco newspaper the Golden Era, Francis Brett Hart, using his newly adopted nom de plume Bret Harte, published his first short story, ‘The Work on Red Mountain’ (later entitled ‘Mliss’). In 1864 he became a contributor and occasional editor of the weekly Californian, and in 1868 the founding editor of the Overland Monthly. In that year he published his most famous story.

As a writer of short stories William Faulkner (1896–1962) presents a paradox. His reputation as the greatest American writer of the first half of the twentieth century rests above all on his novels, particularly those written between 1929 and 1936: The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Sanctuary (1931), Light in August (1932) and Absalom! Absalom! (1936). And his most characteristic narrative style, expansive, repetitive, circling on itself, incorporating wide-ranging, multifarious material in long, sustained, heavily loaded sentences, would seem to lend itself above all to the longer form. But he also wrote a large number of short stories or longer tales which, in the eyes of many critics, contain some of his finest achievements. There are forty-two stories in the Collected Stories which came out in 1950; in 1979 there appeared a further volume, Uncollected Stories, containing several early versions of stories later revised, twelve uncollected stories, and thirteen stories never previously published. In addition there are the stories in Go Down, Moses (1942), sometimes seen as a novel but better treated as a cycle of related stories, mainly about the McCaslin family and their neighbours in Jefferson, Yoknapatawpha county, Mississippi, that semi-mythical area in which a great part of Faulkner's fiction is set. Malcolm Cowley, one of Faulkner's most noted critics, has compiled The Portable Faulkner (1946), which sets out chronologically some of the most important episodes – short and long stories and parts of novels – from what Cowley calls the Yoknapatawpha ‘saga’.

Two writers at the very beginning of the American short story tradition, Washington Irving (1783–1859) and William Austin (1778–1843), produced stories which not only constitute the foundations of a genre but also deal with the foundations of modern American society itself. Other stories by Irving and Austin approach the genre by way of Romance, parable and sketch, and prepared the ground for the greater achievement of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Irving's ‘Rip Van Winkle’ (1819) and Austin's ‘Peter Rugg, the Missing Man’ (1824) also provide paradigmatic examples of the way the short story frequently – one might almost say typically – takes a moment of crisis as its subject matter: the moment which marks a radical change in the life of an individual, a group or, as here, a whole nation. Their small handful of other stories also tend to deal with crisis, usually psychological or moral, by way of ‘Romance’ (defined by Hawthorne as ‘a neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other’) or the semi-supernatural or ‘fantastic’. The term ‘tale’ was commonly used in the nineteenth century for this kind of story.

Washington Irving

Irving's ‘Rip Van Winkle’ is one of only three short stories or tales, as he more often called them, in The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819–20), a collection mostly made up of essays, sketches and anecdotes, many of which are not on American topics but grew out of Irving's travels in Britain between 1815 and 1817.

O. Henry

Two writers who particularly represent the growth of the popular short story at the beginning of the twentieth century are O. Henry and Jack London, the first capturing the public taste through cleverly plotted comic stories and the second through stories of adventure and travel. Born in 1862 in Greensboro, North Carolina, William Sydney Porter, who took ‘O. Henry’ as his nom-de-plume, began publication of his own humorous weekly magazine, The Rolling Stone, which ran for a year in 1894. In 1898 he was tried for and found guilty of embezzling public funds from his job at the First National Bank in Austin, Texas, sentenced to five years in prison, and released after three years for good behaviour. While in prison he wrote several stories which were published in national magazines. During the remaining twelve years of his life he published stories in a number of magazines (Dispatch in Pittsburgh, and Ainslee's and Sunday World in New York, among others), and in twelve books, including Cabbages and Kings (1904, his first book) and The Four Million (1908, a collection of twenty-five new York stories which brought him international fame and popularity).

O. Henry's popularity and his literary reputation have fluctuated considerably. By 1920 nearly five million copies of his books had been sold in the United States, and he was widely read in England and Europe. Nearly a million copies were sold in Russia between 1924 and 1927.

From its earliest years in the United States, the short story was a form which attracted a growing number of women writers. Magazine publication, which did so much to foster the short story form, was from the first often aimed at women readers. Godey's Lady's Book, first published in Philadelphia in 1830, grew out of the fashion for annuals, and was a monthly volume containing articles, tales and sketches, engravings of fashionable ladies and landscapes, and colour fashion plates. A rival magazine from Boston, The American Ladies' Magazine and Literary Gazette, appeared in 1837, and its editor Sarah Joseph Hale announced: ‘We have the assistance of many of our best female writers. We offer a field where female genius may find scope; where the female mind may engage its appropriate work – that of benefiting the female sex.’ Nathaniel Hawthorne, notoriously, dismissed women writers of his day as that ‘damned mob of scribbling women’, but nineteenth-century women writers have recently begun to regain critical attention; republication of the main authors, together with a number of anthologies, has helped to rediscover an important strand of literary tradition. This chapter and the next will focus on seven writers who have come to be seen as especially significant: Rebecca Harding Davis (1831–1910), Sarah Orne Jewett (1849–1909), Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (1852–1930), Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935), Kate Chopin (1851–1904), Edith Wharton (1862–1937) and Willa Cather (1873–1947).

Katherine Anne Porter

From the 1920s to the 1950s there was a remarkable flowering of the Southern short story in the work of three writers: Katherine Anne Porter (1890–1980), Eudora Welty (1909–) and Flannery O'Connor (1925–64). Katherine Anne Porter came originally from Texas, from a family with illustrious Southern roots. She saw herself above all as a writer of short stories, publishing five main volumes: Flowering Judas (1930), Flowering Judas and Other Stories (1935), Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939, three longer stories or novellas, comprising the title story, ‘Old Mortality’ and ‘Noon Wine’), The Leaning Tower and Other Stories (1944) and The Old Order. Her Collected Stories were published in 1964. Her single novel, The Ship of Fools, by contrast took her over twenty-five years to write, and did not appear until 1965.

In Flowering Judas the title story draws on Porter's experience of Mexican revolutionaries in the 1920s. It is a portrait of a chaste young woman (based on an Irish girl Porter knew) who dutifully helps with the revolution but is averse to the blandishments of the overweight, self-indulgent leader Braggioni (who sings to her, excruciatingly, accompanying himself on his guitar) and holds herself conscientiously aloof from him. The predominant tone seems to be sardonic, but it is complicated by a strain of romantic longing in the heroine who at the end dreams of escaping with a young prisoner she has been visiting in the local jail: the dream turns into a nightmare of death and sacramental murder, as she eats the petals of the Judas tree outside her window and the young prisoner calls her ‘murderer’ and ‘cannibal’.

In the 1970s and 1980s there was a notable revival of interest in the short story in America. And if there was one single figure who represented this revival and was the focus of this interest it was Raymond Carver. Born in Clatskanie, Oregon, in 1938, Carver worked with his father in a sawmill and took other menial jobs (gas station attendant, hospital orderly) before enrolling in Chico State College in California. Coming from this backgound, he represents another of those periodic shifts in American literature away from the predominance of the East Coast middle class. He also represents a return to realism as a literary mode after the postmodern experimentation of Barthelme, Gass and others; a realism which owes much to Hemingway but which also gives the mode a distinctively new inflection, exploring the strange turns of ordinary life, the odd corners within the familiar.

Carver professed an admiration for the early stories of Donald Barthelme, but felt that the movement he represented had run its course and that his widespread influence on other writers (particularly students in university creative writing classes) was not always a benign one. Instead he turned to stories with ‘lines of reference back to the real world’: stories in a tradition which he saw as including Tolstoy, but above all Anton Chekhov (‘the best short story writer who ever lived’), who often wrote about a ‘submerged population’ (Carver echoes Frank O'Connor here) and ‘gave voice’ to the inarticulate.

Hawthorne's predilection for the mode of ‘Romance’ was undoubtedly one of the main factors in leading him towards the short story form. Romance, as understood by Hawthorne and later by Henry James, encourages an imaginative freedom with ordinary everyday circumstance and also a higher degree of metaphoric meaning, symbolism and allegory, and it can be argued that these elements are more easily embodied in the short story or tale than in the novel. It could even be argued that the greatest of Hawthorne's novels, The Scarlet Letter, is essentially an expanded short story, or at least a novella. The central image of the woman with the A embroidered on her dress was, in fact, first sketched by Hawthorne in the short story ‘Endicott and the Red Cross’ (1837), where the woman is the last and most suggestive figure in a sketch of various guilty individuals in the town of Salem ‘whose punishment would be lifelong’. The central symbol of the letter, with its moral paradox, is the heart of the novel, ‘the idea as hero’.

Hawthorne began his career as a writer of short pieces. His first published short story ‘The Hollow of the Three Hills’, appeared in The Salem Gazette in 1830, and throughout the thirties and forties a host of stories followed in that and other magazines like The Token, The New England Magazine and The Democratic Review. His first book collections of the stories were Twice-Told Tales (1837) and Twice-Told Tales (Second Series) (1842).

The beginning of the twentieth century saw a huge growth in the popularity and sales of the short story, and at the same time important changes in its form and preoccupations, particularly among serious practitioners. In 1885 there were around 3,300 magazines in the United States which published short stories. By 1905 this figure had risen to 10,800. The short story was seen as the ideal popular form because of its easily assimilable length, and its frequent preoccupation (inherited originally from Poe) with the sensational, the strange and the dramatic. As Andrew Levy has pointed out, it also appealed to an age which was beginning to value the virtues of efficient mass production, the ‘machine aesthetic’ which lauded the well-made, the conventional and the easily used, ‘maximal efficiency and minimum waste’. The first twenty years of the century also saw the appearance of handbooks on how to write short stories, which were popular to well into the mid-century (and still persist): those guides to commercially successful writing which laid down ‘rules’ of plot structure, character presentation, the creation of atmosphere and the like. Needless to say, these books tended actively to discourage innovation – ‘Don't stray from the norm’ one publication of 1957 was still advising – and appealed to writers very different from the ones discussed in this book.

The Jewish American short story, 1950–1980

One of the most persistent functions of the American short story from the last decades of the nineteenth century has been to act as a kind of advance guard for new voices, particularly for new immigrant or older ‘marginalized’ sections of American society. Newness and marginality are no longer the appropriate words for any of the different American ethnic groups, but the short story still plays a significant role in giving them cognizance of each other, intimate glimpses into the very feeling and texture of life in different communities. One can hardly any longer talk of a ‘mainstream’, or if one can, it is no longer homogeneous: rather there is a sense of many different groups contributing to a kind of literary centre ground governed by the major writers from all groups, and the major short story magazines and publishing houses. No self-respecting writer would want to be mainly regarded in terms of ethnic or regional identity, but there is still a strong sense in many writers of allegiance to this. American Jewish writers of this period, like Isaac Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, Grace Paley, and Tillie Olsen (confining ourselves once again to writers who have made a significant contribution to the short story), have, to greater or lesser degrees, written about Jewish communities and issues. Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote in Yiddish and drew a great deal on traditional European Jewish culture and folk story traditions.

I have chosen to conclude my account of the American short story with Carver, both because of his special distinction and because of the undoubted influence his example has had on the prestige and status of the form in our own time. But other major contemporary writers like John Updike (discussed in Chapter 19) and Joyce Carole Oates have produced several volumes of short stories since the 1950s and 1960s respectively; and since the 1980s, too, the short story has inspired a remarkable fecundity and brilliance among newer writers. Labels are always indadequate, but from among those who have been called ‘the new realists’ one would want to single out the names of Tobias Wolff, Richard Ford, Bobbie Ann Mason, Mary Robison, Andre Dubus and Richard Bausch. From those writers who have experimented with very short forms two of the most striking are Amy Hempel and Jayne Ann Phillips, and the latter's work often includes a lyrical, visionary element which is notable also in the stories of Denis Johnson. Anne Beattie and Lorrie Moore are two writers who have penetratingly explored the world of a new generation of middle-class professional characters, with a comic and witty emphasis. Annie Proulx has explored the territory of the contemporary rural East and ‘cowboy’ West in stories which have a sharp, grainy sense of landscape, weather and human oddity. African American writing has seen strong recent collections from Jamaica Kincaid and Edward P. Jones.