From the political and economic tumult of the nineteenth century, the American short story emerged as a distinct and powerful national art form. Bolstered by early trailblazers such as Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles W. Chesnutt, Kate Chopin, and many others, the genre proliferated in magazines and gift books that dominated the era’s literary culture, opening new frontiers in fiction and addressing head-on the central issues of the age, from slavery and the Civil War to industrialization, marriage, sex, and the supernatural.
In Library of America’s long-awaited, just-published The American Short Story: The Nineteenth Century, more than one hundred stories by fifty-one authors come together in two volumes that testify to the astonishing range of the period’s writers and present their vital and enduring works to a new generation of readers.
Below, volume editor John Stauffer delves into the fascinating rise of the short story, introducing its foundational voices, uncovering its key themes, and explaining how its innovations and imaginative risks bridge time to speak to us in the present day.
Library of America: How do you define a short story? What are the form’s parameters?
John Stauffer: Short stories are as old as civilization. The Epic of Gilgamesh, from ancient Mesopotamia (around 2100 BCE) and often considered the oldest surviving work of literature, originally consisted of individual stories that were later combined into a cohesive collection. Aesop, after having been sold into slavery in Greek antiquity as a prisoner of war, captured the psychology of a slave society in his famous fables, another early form of short stories. Originated in the Roman Empire, the “anecdote”—a story that made a point—remained popular into the eighteenth century. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales are another early form of short stories.
The modern short story emerged in the nineteenth century and incorporated the realistic properties of popular journalism, rich descriptions of scenery and locale, unforgettable characters, and a polished style that encompassed a variety of moods. Still, as Joyce Carol Oates has observed, formal definitions of the short story abound, but none are “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?”
The American Short Story: The Nineteenth Century (Volume I)
LOA: The short story emerged as a distinctive American art form in the nineteenth century. What factors propelled its rise and development?
JS: The nineteenth century was marked by tremendous change and innovation in American writing, and the short story was at the center of that creative and intellectual ferment, fueled by the evolution of new printing technologies, the rapid growth of periodical literature, and rising literacy rates. Washington Irving’s The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819), a collection of essays and short stories, became the United States’s first literary bestseller, offering a rebuttal to British critics who had long laughed at the paucity of US cultural achievement. Looking backward at the accomplishment of the American short story in The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story (1962), the celebrated Irish short story writer Frank O’Connor remarked, “Americans have handled the short story so wonderfully that one can say that it is a national art form.”
The American Short Story: The Nineteenth Century (Volume II)
LOA: Can you describe the print culture of the nineteenth century in which these works were first published and circulated?
JS: The vast majority of the stories in this anthology—more than eighty of one hundred three—were first published in magazines or journals. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, periodicals were local publications with small circulation, such as Salmagundi and Boston’s Monthly Anthology, aimed at the educated few who could afford them. These tended to be short-lived ventures, typically folding in less than two years.
The critic Frank Luther Mott records that between 1825 and 1850 the number of magazines published in the United States increased from about one hundred to six hundred, among them cheaper weeklies or biweeklies known as “story papers” (dedicated almost entirely to fiction) and magazines with wider circulation, such as Godey’s Lady’s Book and Graham’s Magazine. By 1845, this rapid growth led C. F. Briggs to observe in his Broadway Journal that “the whole tendency of the age is magazineward.”
Nineteenth-century magazines: Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, Godey’s Lady Book, and Salmagundi
These trends continued after the Civil War, when a new American literary high culture emerged, as influential writer-critics took editorial control of genteel publications such as Harper’s Monthly, The Atlantic Monthly, and Scribner’s Monthly. From the pages of Harper’s, William Dean Howells conducted his campaign for literary realism. Perhaps no writer exerted more influence in the second half of the century as a critic, editor, anthologist, and champion of other writers than Howells, and that influence can be seen everywhere in this anthology. As a writer, Howells is better known for his novels, but some of his short fiction remains compelling. (“Editha” is as powerful an indictment of a romanticized view of war as anything his protégé Stephen Crane ever wrote.)
But it is Poe’s particular brand of Gothic horror, with its insistence on the exploration of the murky interiors of the self, that has left its greatest mark on the short story.
Another important venue for antebellum American story writers was gift books, also known as souvenir books, keepsakes, or annuals: literary compilations of prose and poetry. Several of Hawthorne’s and Poe’s stories first appeared in gift books, including, in this anthology, Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil” and Poe’s “The Purloined Letter.” Lavishly bound and decorated, these books appeared in stores in the fall, much like today, in advance of the holiday gift-giving season.
Notably, a subset of the gift market supported reform causes. Frederick Douglass’s only work of fiction, “The Heroic Slave,” (included in this anthology), first appeared in the gift book Autographs for Freedom (1853), a compilation of stories, poetry, essays, and correspondence by a broad range of writers who opposed slavery, created to promote a broader antislavery alliance and to financially support Douglass’s journalistic enterprises.
The 1853 gift book Autographs for Freedom and illustration of the Creole mutiny depicted in Frederick Douglass’s sole work of fiction, “The Heroic Slave” (Public Domain)
LOA: How did you make your selections for this volume? Were there any editorial challenges?
JS: The contents of this anthology have not been chosen to meet the requirements of a narrow, formal definition of the short story. Indeed, that is not possible, since the modern short story as a distinct form was still evolving in the nineteenth century. (The term “short story” itself, prior to the 1880s, referred primarily to children’s tales.)
As a practical matter, we excluded from consideration any stories longer than forty pages in the Library of America series format. This meant leaving out justly celebrated longer stories such as Melville’s “Benito Cereno” and Twain’s “The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg.” Conversely, we might also ask: when is a short story too short? This anthology does not attempt to answer that question, but, as a matter of interest, the shortest stories in this volume are a mere two and a half pages: James McCune Smith’s “The Washerwoman” and Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour.”
Portraits of nineteenth-century writers (clockwise from top left): Charles Brockden Brown, Alice Dunbar Nelson, and Constance Fenimore Woolson (Public Domain)
One of the major editorial questions was how to establish cutoff dates for inclusion. The earliest stories here were published in 1805 and 1807: Charles Brockden Brown’s “Somnabulism” and Washington Irving’s “The Little Man in Black”. There is nothing between 1800 and 1804 that we decided to include, though other early stories by Brown were considered. Conversely, what stories by writers working in 1900 and beyond should be included? Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, and Paul Laurence Dunbar are among the last-born writers in this anthology: they were all dead by 1906 and belong to the nineteenth century.
Other writers presented slightly more difficult challenges. Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, Francis Hopkinson Smith, Harriett Prescott Spofford, George Washington Cable, Joel Chandler Harris, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Thomas Nelson Page, Alice Brown, Charles W. Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Hamlin Garland, Sadakichi Hartmann, and Alice Dunbar-Nelson all lived a decade or longer into the twentieth century. More than a few of these writers had abandoned fiction early in the new century or found that tastes had changed, leaving them without readers. Their best work is associated with the prior century, and they are represented here by stories published or written in the nineteenth century, or in a few instances, by stories written at the very beginning of the twentieth.
Two master practitioners of the form—Edith Wharton and Henry James—could not be contained within the nineteenth century. Both belong as much to the twentieth century as to the nineteenth. Wharton was only just getting started as a professional writer in the 1890s, but she was already an extremely accomplished story writer. It seemed impossible not to include some of her earlier stories in this anthology; readers will find two of her best early stories here.
Edith Wharton and Henry James (Public Domain)
Henry James, the most influential writer of the second half of the nineteenth century, lived until 1916. Some of his late stories—“The Jolly Corner” (1908) comes immediately to mind—are acknowledged masterpieces, but readers will not find them here. As with Wharton, James is represented in this anthology by stories that appeared before 1900. In fairness to the editors of a future Library of America edition dedicated to the twentieth-century American short story, we leave for their consideration stories by James and Wharton published after 1900, as we do the interesting work of Native American short story writers who were starting out at the beginning of the twentieth century.
LOA: What are some individual stories you might call out for readers’ attention?
JS: Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” and Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat,” among other favorites, seem unavoidable. However, fewer readers will know Constance Fenimore Woolson’s masterpiece “‘Miss Grief,’” Sarah Orne’s Jewett’s heartbreaking story “The Only Rose,” or Charles W. Chesnutt’s surprising “Baxter’s Procrustes.” Fewer still will know Frances Parkman’s “The Scalp-Hunter”—or perhaps even that the historian wrote stories.
Rip Van Winkle Awakening from His Long Sleep by Henry Inman, 1823 (Public Domain)
A handful of the stories fall into the category of “one-hit wonders.” One of the greatest of the antebellum era is William Austin’s “Peter Rugg, the Missing Man,” an eerie, unforgettable story that was so widely circulated and reprinted in the nineteenth century that it passed into New England folklore. Lucretia Hale’s “The Queen of the Red Chessmen” is another, perhaps the greatest one-hit wonder of the mid-nineteenth century, a feminist fantasy in which a red chess queen comes to life.
Rebecca Harding Davis’s “Life in the Iron-Mills,” published anonymously in The Atlantic Monthly in 1861, hardly counts as a one-hit wonder: Harding explored social and political issues in numerous novels and stories. But “Life in the Iron-Mills,” a pioneering work of social realism, stands apart for its power, signaling more clearly than any other mid-century story the shift from romance to realism as the dominant mode of storytelling.
Bethlehem Steel Works by Joseph Pennell, 1881 (Public Domain)
Several stories that were once staples of the classroom receive in this anthology a second chance: Frank Stockton’s “The Lady, or the Tiger?” and its delightful metafictional sequel, “The Discourager of Hesitancy.” Edward Everett Hale’s “The Man Without a Country”—written and published in the third year of the Civil War, when the war’s outcome remained uncertain—was for several decades quite popular, then suddenly branded as “flawed” and disappeared from public consciousness. It deserves to be read alongside other great stories of the war, such as those by Ambrose Bierce, Hamlin Garland, Harold Frederic, and Constance Fenimore Woolson.
LOA: Edgar Allan Poe’s shadow looms large over this anthology. Can you explain his unique impact on the short story?
JS: Edgar Allan Poe, represented by five stories (though “tales” was Poe’s preferred term), occupies a singular place in this anthology owing to his enormous influence as a writer, critic, reviewer, and theorist of the short story form. He emphasized in his writing about the story the qualities of brevity, “unity of effect,” symbolic meaning, and the power of suggestion. In “The Philosophy of Composition,” he famously declared that a short story has “a distinct limit”; stories should be able to be read in a single sitting.
Edgar Allan Poe (Public Domain)
Poe’s influence can hardly be overstated. He invented detective fiction with his three tales featuring the brilliant chevalier M. Auguste Dupin (among them, included here, “The Purloined Letter”). Modern practitioners of science fiction embrace Poe as a forefather for his use of scientificism (or the appearance of it) in his fiction. But it is Poe’s particular brand of Gothic horror, with its insistence on the exploration of the murky interiors of the self, that has left its greatest mark on the short story. We see his influence on the horror stories of Fitz-James O’Brien, Harriet Prescott Spofford, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Even Twain, a pioneer of literary realism, tried his hand at a Poe-inspired Gothic story in “The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut.”
LOA: The foreshocks and aftershocks of the Civil War can be felt throughout this anthology. How did sectionalism and the divide between northern and southern states shape American fiction?
JS: In the antebellum era, the majority of short stories were written, published, and read by northerners. The slave states had far lower literacy rates, fewer schools and transportation networks, and a less-developed print culture than the free states. The south was a quasi-feudal society, as Keidrick Roy has shown. White southerners banned or burned northern papers, magazines, and stories that appeared threatening to slavery. At the same time, it cannot be denied that southerners influenced the short story form.
In particular, our decision to include in this anthology stories by George Chandler Harris (two Uncle Remus stories) and Thomas Nelson Page (“Marse Chan”) requires a word of explanation. Page’s popular and influential dialect story helped disseminate the Lost Cause myth throughout the New South. Both writers remained unreconstructed southerners, compelling and captivating folklorists whose stories, while sanitizing slavery, celebrate racial reconciliation but not equality. It is precisely this sentimental picture of the Old South drawn by these writers to which Charles W. Chesnutt responded in his extraordinary dialect stories in The Conjure Woman. Would Chesnutt’s stories have been possible without Harris and Page before him?
Portraits of nineteenth century writers: Lafcadio Hearn, Kate Chopin, Charles W. Chesnutt, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Bret Harte (Public Domain)
LOA: To expand on that, could you discuss the contributions of Black writers to this anthology?
JS: The history of the African American short story begins in the 1850s, with Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, James McCune Smith, and McCune’s friend and publisher Frederick Douglass. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper story’s “The Two Offers,” the first short story published in by an African American woman, appeared in 1859 in the Black-owned newspaper Anglo-African Magazine, which promoted “Literature, Science, Statistics, and the advancement of the cause of human freedom.”
James McCune Smith, the first professionally trained African American physician and a prominent abolitionist, published a series of extraordinary stories in Frederick Douglass’ Paper in the 1850s called “Heads of the Colored People.” Two of McCune Smith’s “Heads” are included in this anthology, “The Washerwoman” and “The Sexton.” Douglass own short story, “The Heroic Slave” (1852), is an imaginative retelling of the Creole mutiny, the most successful slave revolt in US history.
With the emergence of Charles W. Chesnutt, the American short story broke new ground with his use of African American folklore and exploration of racial identity. Chesnutt developed a broad and enthusiastic readership that included both white and Black readers, and his stories would greatly influence twentieth and twenty-first century American fiction. A range of Chesnutt’s work is on display in this anthology.
Paul Laurence Dunbar, the son of formerly enslaved people, is known primarily as a poet, but he also wrote more than one hundred stories, all composed between 1890 and his premature death in 1906. Three of his best—“Mr. Cornelius Johnson, Office-Seeker,” “Cahoots,” and “The Lynching of Jube Benson”—are included here. Two stories by Alice Dunbar-Nelson, who was briefly married to Dunbar and a member of New Orlean’s mixed-race Creole community, have also been selected. Her story of passing, “The Stones of the Village,” written in 1900 but unable to be published in her lifetime, fittingly concludes this anthology.
Paul Laurence Dunbar and Nathaniel Parker Willis (Public Domain)
LOA: There are also several stories in the collection that could be described as antecedents of queer literature.
JS: Several stories in this anthology might be called gay or lesbian stories, provided we recognize that the terms “gay,” “lesbian,” “homosexual,” and “bisexual” are anachronistic terms. Through most of the nineteenth century sexual identities were comparatively fluid and open; same-sex intimacy was considered sinful, but no more so than a man and woman having carnal relations outside of marriage.
Nathaniel Parker Willis’s “The Lunatic’s Skate,” which has largely been forgotten, is a highly charged, beautifully rendered homoerotic love story between a benighted, unnamed narrator who reunites with his lover or would-be lover, Larry Wynn. (Much like Ring Lardner’s “Haircut,” the story features a bottomlessly ignorant narrator who possesses all the facts but can’t put them together.) Fitz-James O’Brien’s “The Lost Room” and “What Was It?” are odd, powerful, and passionate gay-gothic stories of decadent horror. Twenty-first century readers, accustomed to reading gay and lesbian fiction, will appreciate Rose Terry Cooke’s “My Visitation” as a powerful ghost story about same-sex passion between women and the threat it presents to the desire for heterosexual marriage.
LOA: Which underappreciated authors in this collection might you recommend to curious readers?
JS: Rose Terry Cooke is a major author whose stories remain underappreciated. Cooke advanced the cause of realism and helped to usher in the vogue of “local color” stories, influencing the prominent women writers who followed her—Constance Fenimore Woolson, Sarah Orne Jewett, Kate Chopin, and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. All these writers are represented by multiple stories in this anthology. As a group, they drew attention to regional dialects and character, and to sensory details of the story’s setting, in exquisitely crafted fiction. With naturalism in the late nineteenth century, women’s local color fiction is one of great triumphs of the American short story.
The American Short Story: The Nineteenth Century boxed set
John Stauffer is the Sumner R. and Marshall S. Kates Professor of English and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. He is the author or editor of twenty books, including the national best seller Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln.
