The American Short Story Collection
The Nineteenth Century
More than 100 short stories by 51 writers redefine the great American literary form.
Diverse, wide-ranging, and unprecedented in its scope, this new two-volume anthology gathers more than 100 stories by 51 writers to track the development of the American short story during the nineteenth century, from Charles Brockden Brown’s haunting gothic tales to the Gilded Age masterpieces of Henry James.
The collection presents generous selections of all the genre’s essential voices: Irving, Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, Twain, James, Jewett, Chopin, Wharton, Crane, and Dunbar. Also included are such stories as Francis Parkman’s “The Scalp-Hunter,” a riveting frontier drama drawn from the author’s travels in New England’s wilderness; two sketches from James McCune Smith’s “Heads of the Colored People” series, which lampoon the racist pseudoscience of phrenology; Lucretia P. Hale’s feminist fantasy “The Queen of the Red Chessman”; Fitz-James O’Brien’s “The Lost Room” and “What Was It?,” powerful tales of decadent horror; Rebecca Harding Davis’s “Life in the Iron-Mills,” a gripping work about the poverty of industrial workers; Francis Hopkinson Smith’s comic masterpiece “Six Hours in Squantico,” about a train traveler stuck in a backwater town; Frank R. Stockton’s “The Lady, or the Tiger?” and its delightfully metafictional sequel, “The Discourager of Hesitancy”; and Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s “The Stones of the Village,” a story of racial passing written in 1900 but unpublished in the author’s lifetime.
Plus – FREE
Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Novels, Stories & Poems
“The Yellow Wall-Paper” has electrified generations of readers, and it remains today the best-known work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935). But her gifts were extensive and diverse, equally at home in supernatural fiction, allegorical fantasy, and social realism. Library of America presents the fullest single-volume edition of Gilman’s inventive and inspiring work ever assembled: two versions of “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” another forty-four brilliant short stories, two utopian novels, and a career-spanning selection of 198 poems.
Enjoy such powerful ghostly tales as “The Giant Wistaria” and “The Rocking-Chair,” along with stories that showcase Gilman’s audacious explorations of sexual politics and the complexity and fluidity of gender, such as “Mrs. Beazley’s Deeds,” “Turned,” “If I Were a Man,” and “If I Were a Woman.” As a special feature, this volume includes the complete set of Gilman’s “Studies in Style,” a series of seventeen virtuoso stories she wrote in 1894 in imitation of such authors as Henry James, Olive Schreiner, Louisa May Alcott, Charles Dickens, and Edgar Allan Poe. Pioneering works of speculative fiction, the sardonic novels Herland and With Her in Ourland imagine a newly discovered utopia in which there have been no men for two thousand years. Joining them is the fourth and final edition of the poetry collection In This Our World, as well as over fifty uncollected poems, all demonstrating Gilman’s genius for satire and her daring challenge to conventional views of the natural and social order.
Other Offers
