A Brief Lecture on the History of
Short Story
By: S. Mostafa Raziee (Soodaroo)


Course Short Story
Instructor of the Course: Madame Taebiee

Khayaam Institute of Higher Education – Mashed, Iran

Table of Consonant:

Introduction
I. History of Development of the Short Story
Early Forms
Additional Information about Aesop, Arabian Night, Washington Irving
New Literary Genre
Additional Information about Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Nikolay Gogol, Ivan Turgenev, Anton Chekhov, Maupassant, Stephen Crane, James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, J. D. Salinger
Innovation
Additional Information about Frantz Kafka, Kurt Vonnegut Jr, Donald Barthelme, Raymond Carver, Carol Joyce Oats, Virginia Woolf
II. Element of the Short Story
III. Art of the Short Story
A. Point of View
Additional Information about Henry James
B. Style
Additional Information about Ernest Hemingway
C. Plot and Structure
Additional Information about O. Henry, William Faulkner
D. Devices
Additional Information about Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery O’Connor
IV. Story Types
Additional Information about Saki, E. M. Forster, Sherwood Anderson
V. Critical Perspectives
Additional Information about Graham Greene, Albert Camus, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, D. H. Lawrence, Leo Tolstoy, Aldous Huxley, H. G. Wells, Ray Bradbury, John Steinbeck, Prosper Merimee, Gustave Flaubert, Jack London, Sir Arthur Canon Doyle, Allophones Daudet, Bierce, W. Somerset Maugham, Liam O’Flaherty, Scott F. Fitzgerald, James Thurber, William Saroyan



Introduction:


Short Story is a fictional work depicting one character’s inner conflict or conflict with others, usually having one thematic focus. Short stories generally produce a single, focused emotional and intellectual response in the reader. Novels, by contrast, usually depict conflicts among many characters developed through a variety of episodes, stimulating a complexity of responses in the reader. The short story form ranges from “short shorts,” which run in length from a sentence to four pages, to novellas that can easily be 100 pages long and exhibit characteristics of both the short story and the novel. Because some works straddle the definitional lines of these three forms of fiction—short story, novella, and novel—the terms should be regarded as approximate rather than absolute.

Distinctions should be made between short tales and the modern short story as it is usually regarded. Short tales go back to the origins of human speech, and some were written down by the Egyptians as long ago as 2000 bc. They usually dramatize a simple subject and theme and emphasize narrative over characterization; the opposite is true of the modern short story, where characterization, mood, style, and language are often more important than the narrative itself. Distinctions should also be made between commercial and literary fiction within the short story genre. From O. Henry to Stephen King, commercial short fiction has traditionally featured predictable plot formulas, stock characters and conflicts, and superficial treatment of themes. Literary short fiction employs complex techniques to depict the often-irresolvable dilemmas of the human predicament.

I. History of Development of the Short Story


Early Forms

The term short story usually refers to the modern short story, which evolved out of earlier types of fiction in prose and verse. The earliest ancestors of short stories are ancient tales, simple stories that date back to Egyptian writings that are 6,000 years old. Another early form was the fable, such as those of the 6th-century-bc Greek slave Aesop, each with a lesson to be expressed. There were also popular Greek and Asian stories of magical transformations, many with moralistic, satirical, and pure entertainment aims, which were gathered and retold by the Roman writers Ovid and Lucius Apuleius in the first several centuries ad. The book Arabian Nights, a famous collection of stories from Persia, Arabia, India, and Egypt, was compiled over hundreds of years. In it, the beautiful queen Scheherazade entrances her husband, the sultan, with a new tale every evening, leaving the suspenseful ending for the next day so he will not carry out his vow to kill her.

Tales in great variety flourished in Western Europe during the Middle Ages. Romance tales, in prose or verse, was common in France. Many of the best stories of the Middle Ages were preserved and refined in two 14th-century works, The Decameron by Italian prose writer Giovanni Boccaccio and The Canterbury Tales by English poet Geoffrey Chaucer. They retold fables, epics about beasts, exempla (religious tales), romances, fabliaux (ribald tales), and legends.

Although these types of tales continued to appear in the centuries that followed, there was a considerable drop in the number published. One source of such stories was the 18th-century English magazine The Spectator, where editors Joseph Addison and Sir Richard Steele published many semi-fictional sketches of contemporary character types. A popular tale from the early 19th century was “Rip Van Winkle” (1819) by American writer Washington Irving.

Additional Information:

Aesop (620?-560? BC), ancient Greek writer of fables, who is supposed to have been a freed slave from Thrace. His name became attached to a collection of beast fables long transmitted through oral tradition. The beast fables are part of the common culture of the Indo-European peoples and constitute perhaps the most widely read collection of fables in world literature. Many of Aesop's fables were rewritten in Greek verse by the poet Babrius, probably a Hellenized Roman of the 1st or 2nd century ad, and in Latin verse by the Roman poet Phaedrus in the 1st century ad. The collection that now bears Aesop's name consists for the most part of later prose paraphrases of the fables of Babrius.


Arabian Nights, or The Thousand and One Nights, collection of stories from Persia, Arabia, India, and Egypt, compiled over hundreds of years. Most of the stories originated as folk tales, anecdotes, or fables that were passed on orally. They include the stories of Ali Baba, Aladdin, and Sindbad the Sailor, which have become particularly popular in Western countries.


The stories in Arabian Nights are told by a legendary queen named Scheherazade in a broader frame story, which starts at the beginning of the collection and gives a context to the various stories it contains. The frame story begins when the sultan Schahriar finds that his wife has been unfaithful and orders her execution. He is so enraged that he resolves to marry a new woman every night and have her killed at daybreak. Scheherazade agrees to marry Schahriar despite the decree and crafts a scheme to thwart him. The night after the wedding, she tells one of the stories to her sister so that the sultan can overhear. She stops, however, before the story comes to its conclusion, and the sultan allows her to live another day so that he can hear the end. She continues this pattern night after night. After 1001 nights, the sultan relents and decides to let Scheherazade live.


The earliest record of Arabian Nights is a fragment of the collection that dates from the 800s. The collection grew during the following centuries until it reached its present form, written in Arabic, in the late 1400s or the 1500s. A scholar named Antoine Galland translated it into French between 1704 and 1717, and called it Les Mille et Une Nuits. The best known English-language versions are Arabian Nights, translated by Edward William Lane in the 1840s, and The Thousand Nights and a Night, translated by Richard Francis Burton in the 1880s. The stories also have been a valuable source of information for scholars studying early Middle Eastern culture.


Irving, Washington (1783-1859), American writer, the first American author to achieve international renown, who created the fictional characters Rip Van Winkle and Ichabod Crane. The critical acceptance and enduring popularity of Irving's tales involving these characters proved the effectiveness of the short story as an American literary form.


Born in New York City, Irving studied law at private schools. After serving in several law offices and traveling in Europe for his health from 1804 to 1806, he was eventually admitted to the bar in 1806. His interest in the law was neither deep nor long-lasting, however, and Irving began to contribute satirical essays and sketches to New York newspapers as early as 1802. A group of these pieces, written from 1802 to 1803 and collected under the title Letters of Jonathan Oldstyle, Gent., won Irving his earliest literary recognition. From 1807 to 1808 he was the leading figure in a social group that included his brothers William Irving and Peter Irving and William's brother-in-law James Kirke Paulding; together they wrote Salmagundi, or, the Whim-Whams and Opinions of Launcelot Langstaff, Esq., and Others, a series of satirical essays and poems on New York society. Irving's contributions to this miscellany established his reputation as an essayist and wit, and this reputation was enhanced by his next work, A History of New York (1809), ostensibly written by Irving's famous comic creation, the Dutch-American scholar Diedrich Knickerbocker. The work is a satirical account of New York State during the period of Dutch occupation (1609-1664); Irving's mocking tone and comical descriptions of early American life counterbalanced the nationalism prevalent in much American writing of the time. Generally considered the first important contribution to American comic literature, and a great popular success from the start, the work brought Irving considerable fame and financial reward.


In 1815 Irving went to Liverpool, England, as a silent partner in his brothers' commercial firm. When, after a series of losses, the business went into bankruptcy in 1818, Irving returned to writing for a living. In England he became the intimate friend of several leading men of letters, including Thomas Campbell, Sir Walter Scott, and Thomas Moore. Under the pen name of Geoffrey Crayon, Irving wrote the essays and short stories collected in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819-1820). The Sketch Book, as it is also known, was his most popular work and was widely acclaimed in both England and the United States for its geniality, grace, and humor. The collection's two most famous stories, both based on German folktales, are “Rip Van Winkle,” about a man who falls asleep in the woods for twenty years, and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” about a schoolteacher's encounter with a legendary headless horseman. Set in rural New York, these tales are considered classics in American literature.


From 1826 until 1829 Irving was a member of the staff of the United States legation in Madrid. During this period and after his return to England, he wrote several historical works, the most popular of which was the History of Christopher Columbus (1828). Another well-known work of this period was The Alhambra (1832), a series of sketches and stories based on Irving's residence in 1829 in an ancient Moorish palace at Granada, Spain. In 1832, after an absence that lasted 17 years, he returned to the United States, where he was welcomed as a figure of international importance. Over the next few years Irving traveled to the American West and wrote several books using the West as their setting. These works include A Tour on the Prairies (1835), Astoria (1836), and The Adventures of Captain Bonneville, U.S.A. (1837).


In 1842 Irving was appointed U.S. minister to Madrid, where he lived until 1846, continuing his historical research and writing. He returned to the United States again in 1846 and settled at Sunnyside, his country home near Tarrytown, New York, where he lived until his death. (Sunnyside is now a historic house and museum.) Irving's popular but elegant style, based on the styles of the British writers Joseph Addison and Oliver Goldsmith, and the ease and picturesque fancy of his best work attracted an international audience. To a certain extent his romantic attachment to Europe resulted in a thinness and overrefinement of material. Much of his work deals directly with English life and customs, and he never attempted to come to terms with the democratic American life of his time. On the other hand, American writers were encouraged by Irving's example to look beyond the United States for subject matter.


Irving's other works include Bracebridge Hall (1822), Tales of a Traveller (1824), A Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada (1829), Oliver Goldsmith (1849), and Life of Washington (5 volumes, 1855-1859).

New Literary Genre

When the short story emerged as a genre in the 19th century, it was seen as something totally new and modern. Popular and literary magazines began increasingly to publish short stories that often reflected the dominant literary trends of the day. Up to that point, the primary focus of most stories had been on the plot.

Nathaniel Hawthorne was one of the most important early writers in the shaping of the modern short story. His pieces probed character and the moral significance of events, leaving their physical reality ambiguous. In “Young Goodman Brown” (1846), for example, the dark meetings in the woods of the Salem townspeople are less important than the spiritual changes in Brown himself. In his 1842 review of Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales (1837), Edgar Allan Poe became the first writer to define the short story as the attempt to achieve a single, focused effect. Poe demonstrated his artistic theory in “The Cask of Amontillado” (1846), manipulating the setting, character, and dialogue to lead the reader inexorably toward the emotional state most appropriate for the “perfect” murder.

During the 19th century a variety of conflicting visions of life emerged that affected the way short-story writers viewed human experience. There is brooding romanticism—seen and heard also in painting, drama, and music—in the short fictions of Heinrich von Kleist (as in “The Earthquake in Chile,” 1810) and E. T. A. Hoffmann (“The Cremona Violin,” 1818) in Germany; Hawthorne (“The Minister’s Black Veil,” 1836) and Poe (“The Fall of the House of Usher,” 1839) in the United States; Nikolay Gogol (“The Nose,” 1836), Ivan Turgenev (“Byezhin Meadow,” 1852), and Anton Chekhov (“The Darling,” 1899) in Russia; and Honoré de Balzac (“A Passion in the Desert,” 1830) in France. Traditional tales were put to new uses, such as transmitting the folklore and history of a region or a nation, while other stories frankly and realistically depicted everyday life. Regionalism is mingled with psychological realism in the New England short stories of Sarah Orne Jewett (as in “The White Heron,” 1886), the deep South stories of Kate Chopin (“The Story of an Hour,” 1894), and the New York stories of Edith Wharton (“After Holbein,” 1930).

In 1868 French novelist-playwright Émile Zola began to develop the theory of naturalism in literature, viewing human motivation and behavior as scientifically predictable and determined by heredity and environment. The most highly regarded of the naturalistic writers was Guy de Maupassant, also a Frenchman, who wrote nearly 300 short stories in the last half of the 1800s. Determinism and pessimism form the vision of life expressed in Ambrose Bierce’s American Civil War stories (such as “In the Midst of Life,” 1891). A contrasting view was expressed in the symbolist movement in poetry, which mingled universal symbolism with private symbolism to explore psychological states and the potentials of the imagination. Naturalists and symbolists influenced many short-story authors throughout the world. Stephen Crane was one of the first American naturalists but he was also a symbolist (as demonstrated in “The Open Boat,” 1898).

By the early 20th century the short story had matured as a form. The stories of James Joyce (“A Little Cloud,” 1914) and Katherine Mansfield (“Miss Brill,” 1920) show the influence of Chekhov and Henry James but with other elements added, such as impressionism and ironic epiphany. In turn, Joyce and Mansfield were a major influence on the so-called New Yorker magazine story, exemplified in the work of the three Johns, O’Hara (“Do You Like It Here?” 1939), Updike (“Pigeon Feathers,” 1961), and Cheever (“The Swimmer,” 1964). These writers are noted for their dispassionate stories about the ironies of suburban life, reflecting the major shift in American living patterns following World War II (1939-1945). Other major authors of the modern story include Irwin Shaw (“The Girls in Their Summer Dresses,” 1939), J. D. Salinger (“Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut,” 1948), Anne Beattie (“A Vintage Thunderbird,” 1978), Tobias Wolff (“The Rich Brother,” 1985), Alice Munro (“Meneseteung,” 1989), and Lorrie Moore (“You’re Ugly, Too,” 1990).

Additional Information:

Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1804-1864), American novelist, whose works are deeply concerned with the ethical problems of sin, punishment, and atonement. Hawthorne's exploration of these themes was related to the sense of guilt he felt about the roles of his ancestors in the 17th-century persecution of Quakers (see Friends, Society of) and in the 1692 witchcraft trials of Salem, Massachusetts.


Poe, Edgar Allan (1809-1849), American writer, known as a poet and critic but most famous as the first master of the short-story form (see Short Story), especially tales of the mysterious and macabre. The literary merits of Poe's writings have been debated since his death, but his works have remained popular and many major American and European writers have professed their artistic debt to him.


Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Poe was orphaned in his early childhood and was raised by John Allan, a successful businessman of Richmond, Virginia. Taken by the Allan family to England at the age of six, Poe was placed in a private school. Upon returning to the United States in 1820, he continued to study in private schools. He attended the University of Virginia for a year, but in 1827 his foster father, displeased by the young man's drinking and gambling, refused to pay his debts and forced him to work as a clerk.


Poe, disliking his new duties intensely, quit the job, thus estranging Allan, and went to Boston. There his first book, Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827), was published anonymously. Shortly afterward Poe enlisted in the U.S. Army and served a two-year term. In 1829 his second volume of verse, Al Aaraaf, was published, and he effected a reconciliation with Allan, who secured him an appointment to the U.S. Military Academy. After only a few months at the academy Poe was dismissed for neglect of duty, and his foster father disowned him permanently.


Poe's third book, Poems, appeared in 1831, and the following year he moved to Baltimore, where he lived with his aunt and her 11-year-old daughter, Virginia Clemm. The following year his tale “A MS. Found in a Bottle” won a contest sponsored by the Baltimore Saturday Visitor. From 1835 to 1837 Poe was an editor of the Southern Literary Messenger. In 1836 he married his young cousin. Throughout the next decade, much of which was marred by his wife's long illness, Poe worked as an editor for various periodicals in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and in New York City. In 1847 Virginia died and Poe himself became ill; his disastrous addiction to liquor and his alleged use of drugs, recorded by contemporaries, may have contributed to his early death.


Gogol, Nikolay Vasilyevich (1809-52), Russian writer, whose plays, short stories, and novels rank among the great masterpieces of 19th-century Russian realist literature.


Gogol was born March 20, 1809, in Sorochintsy, Mirgorod, Poltava Province, of Cossack parents. In 1828 he went to Saint Petersburg, where he eventually secured employment in the civil service and became known in literary circles. Enthusiastic praise greeted his volume of short stories of Ukrainian life, Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka (1831). Then followed another collection, Mirgorod (1835), containing “Taras Bulba,” which was expanded in 1842 into a full-length novel; this work, dealing with 16th-century Cossack life, revealed the writer's great ability for accurate and sympathetic character portrayal and his sparkling humor.


In 1836 Gogol's play The Inspector General appeared. A rollicking satire on the cupidity and stupidity of bureaucratic officials, it is a comedy of errors regarded by many critics as one of the most significant plays in Russian literature. It concerns the local officials of a small town who mistake a young traveler for an expected government inspector and offer him propitiatory bribes to induce him to overlook their misconduct in office.


From 1826 to 1848 Gogol lived mostly in Rome, where he worked on a novel that is considered his greatest creative effort and one of the finest novels in world literature, Dead Souls (1842). It has also been published in English under the alternative title Chichikov's Journey. In structure, Dead Souls is akin to Don Quixote by the Spanish novelist Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. Its extraordinary humor, however, is derived from a unique and sardonic conception: Collegiate Councillor Pável Ivanovich Chichikov, an ambitious, shrewd, and unscrupulous adventurer, goes from place to place, buying, stealing, and wheedling from their owners the titles to serfs whose names appeared on the preceding census lists but who had since died and were, accordingly, called “dead souls.” With this “property” as security he plans to raise loans with which to buy an estate with “live souls.”


Chichikov's travels provide the occasion for profound reflections on the degrading and stultifying influence of serfdom on both owner and serf. The work also contains a large number of brilliantly depicted Russian provincial types. Dead Souls exerted an enormous influence on succeeding generations of Russian writers. Many of the witty sayings expressed in its pages have become Russian maxims.


As published, Dead Souls was intended to constitute the first part of a larger work; Gogol began the sequel but in a fit of hypochondriacal melancholy burned the manuscript. In 1842 Gogol published another famous work, “The Overcoat,” a short story about an overworked clerk who falls victim to Russian social injustice. In the following year Gogol made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and on his return a priest persuaded him that his fictional work was sinful. Gogol thereupon destroyed a number of his unpublished manuscripts. He died March 4, 1852, in Moscow. Gogol is ranked with such literary giants as the novelists Leo Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky and the poet Aleksandr Pushkin.


Turgenev, Ivan Sergeyevich (1818-1883), Russian author, considered the foremost stylist in Russian literature; his novels, poems, and plays are characterized by elegant craftsmanship, lucidity, and a liberal, balanced point of view.



Turgenev was born November 9, 1818, in Orël in central Russia and educated at the universities of Saint Petersburg and Berlin. On his family estates, while still a child, he first witnessed the mistreatment and suffering of the serf class; such abuse, widespread in the Russian economic system, eventually became a recurrent theme in his writings. Before turning to a literary career, Turgenev worked for a short time as a minor civil servant in Saint Petersburg. His first published work, the long poem Parasha (1843), was well received by literary critics. Through the next few years the publication of several of his short stories established Turgenev as a significant Russian writer. He became involved in the ideological controversy between two groups of intellectuals known as the Westernizers and the Slavophiles. The Westernizers urged Russians to better their lives by incorporating into them the best aspects of European culture. The Slavophiles, rigidly Orthodox, championed native Russian customs and believed that they should remain untainted by foreign influences. Turgenev sided with the Westernizers. Later, he spent long periods of time outside Russia, often mainly to be near the celebrated opera singer Pauline Viardot-Garcia, whom he loved. After 1871 he remained in Paris. He died near there, at Bougival, September 3, 1883.


Turgenev wrote plays, stories, novels, and nonfiction sketches. He had published several poems and prose sketches before the appearance of his first book, A Sportsman's Sketches (1852), a collection of stories of Russian peasant life. Of the many plays he wrote early in his career, the finest is probably A Month in the Country (1850), a gentle but penetrating study of aristocratic life still frequently performed. Of his stories or short novels, First Love (1860) and Torrents of Spring (1872) are notable as lyric, beautifully realized evocations of love. His longer novels include On the Eve (1860) and Smoke (1867), both portraits of passionate young girls and their stormy love affairs. In his masterpiece, Fathers and Sons (1862), Turgenev names, defines, and analyzes the philosophy of nihilism; Bazarov, the hero of the novel, is an idealistic young radical, a commoner and a university student, dedicated to universal freedom and destined for tragedy in his own life. Turgenev believed in the goals of his hero, but he also believed that they could be achieved only through a long period of gradual change rather than by revolution. Turgenev's complete works have been translated into English.


Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich (1860-1904), Russian writer, who brought both the short story and the drama to new prominence in Russia and eventually in the Western world. Taking a cool, objective stance toward his characters, Chekhov conveys their inner lives and feelings indirectly, by suggestion rather than statement. His plots are usually simple, and the endings of both his stories and his plays tend toward openness rather than finality. Chekhov’s works create the effect of profound experience taking place beneath the surface in the ordinary lives of unexceptional people.


Chekhov was born in the southern Russian town of Taganrog, where his father kept a small general store. In 1879 he entered the University of Moscow to study medicine. While still a student, he began contributing short comic sketches to humor magazines to help support his family. After he finished his studies in 1884 Chekhov practiced medicine, but he continued to write. By 1887 his literary talent had received popular recognition and his writing left little time for his medical practice.


In 1890 Chekhov made an arduous 9650-km (6000-mi) journey across Siberia by train, river steamer, and horse-drawn carriage to conduct a sociological and medical survey in a Russian penal colony on Sakhalin Island, off the eastern coast of Russia. His findings, published in 1893 and 1894 as Ostrov Sakhalin (The Island of Sakhalin), had some influence in moderating the harsh prison rule on the island. In 1891 he purchased Melikhovo, a small estate south of Moscow, where he wrote some of his finest short stories. Chekhov had suffered from tuberculosis for years, and in 1897 he moved to the milder climate of Yalta, on the Black Sea, for health reasons.


The theater had long fascinated Chekhov, but the initial productions of his first major plays failed—Ivanov in 1887 and Chaika (The Seagull) in 1896. His first theatrical triumph came in 1898 with a production of The Seagull by the new and innovative Moscow Art Theater, under director Konstantin Stanislavsky. The Art Theater’s productions of his subsequent plays, Diadia Vanya (1899; Uncle Vanya), Tri sestry (1901; The Three Sisters), and Vishnevyi sad (1904; The Cherry Orchard), established the works as Chekhov’s four masterpieces. In 1901 Chekhov married a young actress named Olga Knipper. His health, meanwhile, had steadily worsened. He died at the German resort of Badenweiler while seeking relief from tuberculosis.


Maupassant, Guy de (1850-1893), French novelist and short-story writer. He is deemed one of the modern masters of the art of the short story and has influenced practitioners of that genre from his time to the present.


Born at Fécamp in Normandy (Normandie) of cultured, middle-class parents, Maupassant was a mediocre student who preferred swimming, boating, and fishing at Etretat, then a newly fashionable resort on the English Channel, to school. His law studies in Paris were interrupted by the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871, which destroyed his family’s fortune and forced Maupassant to find work as a government office clerk. To divert himself from the office work he found tedious, he swam, boated, pursued feminine company at fashionable places, and began to write.


French novelist Gustave Flaubert had been a childhood friend of Maupassant’s mother, and in the 1870s he introduced Maupassant to Parisian literary society, then dominated by Émile Zola and naturalism. The naturalist movement, led by Zola, emphasized the portrayal of instincts, emotions, and other forces that govern human behavior. Soon Maupassant was a member of the naturalist group, and his story “Boule de suif” (“Ball of Fat”) was published in their Les Soirées de Médan (The Parties at Medan, 1880), a collection of stories about the Franco-Prussian War. Maupassant became an overnight celebrity and soon was surpassed only by Zola as the best-selling author in France.


For a decade Maupassant’s literary production was astounding. He wrote nearly 300 stories, 200 newspaper articles, 6 novels, and 3 travel books. He became very wealthy and spent his earnings extravagantly. In leading a dissolute life, Maupassant contracted syphilis and by the late 1880s had begun to show signs of mental complications. On New Year’s Day 1892, Maupassant attempted suicide and entered a clinic, where he died the following year.


Crane, Stephen (1871-1900), American novelist and poet, one of the first American exponents of the naturalistic style of writing (see Naturalism). Crane is known for his pessimistic and often brutal portrayals of the human condition, but his stark realism is relieved by poetic charm and a sympathetic understanding of character.


Born in Newark, New Jersey, Crane was educated at Lafayette College and Syracuse University. In 1891 he began work in New York City as a freelance reporter in the slums. From his work and his own penniless existence in the Bowery he drew material for his first novel, Maggie, a Girl of the Streets (1893), which he published at his own expense under the pseudonym Johnston Smith. The work, the story of a young prostitute who commits suicide, won praise from the American writers Hamlin Garland and William Dean Howells but was not a popular success. Crane's next novel, The Red Badge of Courage (1895), gained international recognition as a penetrating and realistic psychological study of a young soldier in the American Civil War (1861-1865).


Although Crane had never experienced military service, the understanding of the ordeals of combat that he revealed in this work compelled various American and foreign newspapers to hire him as a correspondent during the Greco-Turkish War (1897) and the Spanish-American War (1898). Shipwrecked while accompanying an expedition from the United States to Cuba in 1896, Crane suffered privations that eventually brought on tuberculosis. His experience was the basis for the title story of his collection The Open Boat and Other Stories (1898). Crane settled in England in 1897; his private life, which included several extramarital affairs, had caused gossip in the United States. In England he was befriended by the writers Joseph Conrad and Henry James.


In addition to being a novelist, journalist, and short-story writer, Crane was also an innovator in verse techniques. His two volumes of poetry, The Black Riders and Other Lines (1895) and War Is Kind and Other Poems (1899), are important early examples of experimental free verse. His other writings include Active Service (1899), Whilomville Stories (1900), and Wounds in the Rain (1900). Crane's collected letters were published in 1954.


Joyce, James (1882-1941), Irish author, whose writings feature revolutionary innovations in prose techniques. He was one of the foremost literary figures of the 20th century. Joyce is best known for his epic novel Ulysses (1922), which uses stream of consciousness, a literary technique that attempts to portray the natural and sometimes irrational flow of thoughts and sensations in a person’s mind.


James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was born in a Dublin suburb. He was the eldest of ten children, and his family was poor and Roman Catholic. As a youth, Joyce was educated at Roman Catholic lower schools and at home. He earned a degree in Latin from University College, Dublin in 1902. While he was at University College, Joyce renounced the Roman Catholic faith. In 1904 he and his companion, Nora Barnacle, left Ireland for good. They lived in Trieste, Italy; Paris, France; and Zürich, Switzerland. They had two children but did not marry until 1932. To support the family, Joyce worked as a language instructor and received writing grants from patrons, but the family was never comfortable financially. During much of his adult life Joyce suffered from a series of severe eye troubles that eventually led to near blindness. He died in 1941, shortly after the outbreak of World War II (1939-1945).


Joyce was a pioneer and a model for authors who believed in free written expression. Most of his works feature inventive language, and many of them have been criticized for being too obscure in their references or too blunt in their descriptions of intimate matters, including sexual activity. His writing evolved steadily from adolescent lyrics to precise vignettes to bold combinations of autobiography and satire. Most of his works deal with everyday life in 20th-century Dublin. Joyce once remarked that “the extraordinary is the province of journalists,” and most of his writings concentrate on ordinary people, objects, and places.


Although Joyce renounced the Roman Catholic faith, his writings frequently refer to the rich tradition of the Church. He compared the artist and the writer to the priest, who performs certain social and aesthetic functions in a dramatic display. He also compared the literary use of symbols to the religious use of sacraments, which are the outward and visible representations of inward and invisible spiritual states. (One such sacrament is baptism, which represents the favor of God bestowed on an individual.) Joyce called some of his early sketches epiphanies; the term epiphany, often used in a religious context, means an understanding that comes about through a sudden intuitive realization. A Joycean epiphany is a small descriptive moment, action, or phrase that holds much larger meaning–for example, a single word or gesture that explains a person’s entire personality.


Mansfield, Katherine (1888-1923), pseudonym of Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp, British short-story writer, born in Wellington, New Zealand. She is considered one of the great masters of the short-story form. At the age of 18 she settled in London to study music and to establish herself as a writer. In 1918 she married the English literary critic John Middleton Murry. She spent the last five years of her life seeking a cure for the tuberculosis that afflicted her.


Mansfield's stories are poetic, delicate, and ironic; they are characterized by a subtle sensitivity to mood and emotion, revealing the inner conflicts her characters face and resolve. Her style, much influenced by that of the Russian writer Anton Chekhov, in turn had great influence on later short-story writing. Collections of her short fiction include In a German Pension (1911); Bliss (1920), which contains stories evocative of her homeland; and The Garden Party (1922), her finest work. The Dove's Nest (1923) and Something Childish (1924), both edited by her husband, were published after Mansfield's death, as were collections of her poems, journals, and letters.


Salinger, J. D. (1919- ), American novelist and short story writer, known for his stories dealing with the intellectual and emotional struggles of adolescents who are alienated from the empty, materialistic world of their parents. Salinger's work is marked by a profound sense of craftsmanship, a keen ear for dialogue, and a deep awareness of the frustrations of life in America after World War II (1939-1945).


Jerome David Salinger was born and raised in New York City. He began writing fiction as a teenager. After graduating from the Valley Forge Military Academy in 1936, he began studies at several colleges in the New York City area, but he took no degree. He did, however, take a fiction writing class with Whit Burnett, an editor of Story magazine, who encouraged Salinger and brought out his first published story, "The Young Folks" (1940).


Over the next several years Salinger contributed short stories to popular magazines such as Collier’s, Esquire, and The Saturday Evening Post, continuing to produce work even while serving in combat during World War II as a staff sergeant in the United States Army from 1942 to 1946. After returning to civilian life, Salinger continued to achieve success with his short stories, many of which were drawn from his war experiences. During the late 1940s he published work in Mademoiselle, Cosmopolitan, and The New Yorker.


At the age of 31, Salinger gained a major place in American fiction with the publication of his only novel, The Catcher in the Rye. The book quickly earned a reputation as a quintessential American coming-of-age tale. In the early 1960s, Salinger virtually stopped writing for publication and disappeared from public view into his rural New Hampshire home. In an interview that he granted during the 1970s, Salinger maintained that he continues to write daily, and has merely rejected publication as "a terrible invasion of his privacy." Salinger’s reclusiveness added to his cult status.


Innovations

The innovative short story—also known as avant-garde, experimental, or unconventional fiction—has a long history, although its most vital period is the second half of the 20th century into the present. Unlike mainstream short fiction, innovative stories do not rely upon conventional character, conflicts, plots, or other standard elements. They are anti-story—typically lacking realism, plot, a focused subject, or a clear meaning—and they explore events through chaos, randomness, arbitrariness, and fragments.

The modern short story itself was once considered an innovation in fiction, and since the 19th century certain writers have pushed the edges of the form. Gogol fused dream and reality in “The Overcoat” (1842), a story about an insignificant clerk who dies of heartbreak after his new overcoat is stolen but who returns as a ghost to seek justice. The stories of Austro-Czech writer Franz Kafka so uniquely mesh the fantastic with the realistic that the adjective Kafkaesque was created to describe stories that echo his. One of the finest of Kafka’s innovative, fable-like stories is “In the Penal Colony” (1919), which deals with imprisonment and torture. British author Virginia Woolf makes extreme use of the omniscient point of view in the story “Kew Gardens” (1919), in which insects, plants, wind, light, and noise are as important as human beings.

Unconventional short fiction became even more widespread after World War II. In his collection Welcome to the Monkey House (1968), American Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., included several stories that make satirical use of the science fiction genre. One such story is “Harrison Bergeron,” which begins, “The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal.” “The Joker’s Greatest Triumph,” a 1965 work by American Donald Barthelme, relates the ordinary home life of Batman and is an example of the pop story. Italian author Tommaso Landolfi makes use of the biographical form to satirize men’s misuse of women in “Gogol’s Wife” (1954). “Blowup” (1956), by Argentine writer Julio Cortázar, uses the development process of photography to reveal aspects of bizarre events.

The story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” (1981) by American Raymond Carver is an example of minimalism, relying on simple, brief narrative passages woven into seemingly banal dialog to imply deeper layers of meaning. Surrealism, which attempts to represent the subconscious, is at work in French writer Anais Nin’s dream story “Ragtime” (1944). In “How I Contemplated the World from the Detroit House of Correction and Began My life Over Again” (1969), American writer Joyce Carol Oates makes bizarre use of the common essay outline to express the psychic damage done to a teenage girl. One of the strangest forms of innovative fiction is metafiction (fiction that comments upon the act of writing the story the reader is reading), as in the stories “Lost in the Funhouse” (1968) by American John Barth and “The Birds” (1969) by American Ronald Sukenick.

Additional Information:


Kafka, Franz (1883-1924), Austrian (Czech) Jewish novelist and short-story writer, whose disturbing, symbolic fiction, written in German, prefigured the oppression and despair of the late 20th century. He is considered one of the most significant figures in modern world literature; the term Kafkaesque has, in fact, come to be applied commonly to grotesque, anxiety-producing social conditions or their treatment in literature.


Kafka was born into a middle-class Jewish family in Prague (then in Austria-Hungary) on July 3, 1883. His father, a merchant, was a domineering figure whose influence pervaded his son's work and (as Kafka perceived it) stifled his life. Letter to His Father (1919; trans. 1966) expresses his feelings of inferiority and paternal rejection. Nevertheless, Kafka lived with his family most of his life, never marrying although engaged twice. His uneasy relationship with Felice Bauer, a young German woman whom he courted between 1912 and 1917, is revealed in the series Letters to Felice (1967; trans. 1973).


Although he had studied law at the University of Prague, Kafka took a civil service post and wrote in his spare time. With the strain of this dual life, added to his anxiety and depression, Kafka contracted tuberculosis in 1917 and died in a sanatorium in Kierling, Austria, on June 3, 1924.


The themes of Kafka's work are the loneliness, frustration, and oppressive guilt of an individual threatened by anonymous forces beyond his comprehension or control. In philosophy, Kafka is akin to the Danish thinker Søren Aabye Kierkegaard and to 20th-century existentialists (see Existentialism). In literary technique, his work has the qualities both of expressionism and of surrealism. Kafka's lucid style, blending reality with fantasy and tinged with ironic humor, contributes to the nightmarish, claustrophobic effect of his work—as in his famous long short story “The Metamorphosis” (1915; trans. 1937). In it, the hero, a hardworking insurance agent, awakens to find that he has turned into an enormous insect; rejected by his family, he is left to die alone. Another story, “In the Penal Colony” (1919; trans. 1941), is a chilling fantasy of imprisonment and torture.


Contrary to Kafka's wish that his unpublished manuscripts be destroyed after his death, his friend and biographer, the Austrian writer Max Brod, published them posthumously and thus established Kafka's reputation. Among these works are the three novels for which Kafka is best known (all first translated by the Scottish poet Edwin Muir and his wife Willa Anderson Muir, 1890-1962): The Trial (1925; trans. 1937), The Castle (1926; trans. 1930), and Amerika (1927; trans. 1938).


Vonnegut, Kurt, Jr. (1922- ), American novelist and short-story writer, best known for his irreverent satires of social and political trends and for his vision of life as an absurd, apocalyptic comedy. Vonnegut’s fable-like tales often use science-fiction or fantasy techniques, presenting fictional worlds that mirror reality in grotesque or exaggerated ways. Vonnegut insists that humans have no choice but to view modern civilization with a mixture of sadness and humor and that the cruelty of life must be countered with a genuine charity for human weakness.


Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis, Indiana. He studied chemistry at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, from 1940 to 1943, but he left without his degree to serve in World War II (1939-1945). In 1944, after his training and shortly before he was shipped out to fight in Europe, his mother committed suicide. Captured by German forces during the Battle of the Bulge that same year, Vonnegut was held prisoner in a slaughterhouse in the German city of Dresden. When British and American air forces firebombed the city early in 1945, killing more than 130,000 people, Vonnegut and other prisoners survived by taking shelter in an underground meat locker.


After the war, Vonnegut pursued graduate studies in anthropology at the University of Chicago in Illinois. He left in 1947 when his master’s thesis was rejected, taking a job in public relations. During this period he began writing, publishing short stories in popular magazines. Encouraged by a publisher, Vonnegut left his job in 1950 to write full-time.


Barthelme, Donald (1931-1989), American novelist and short-story writer, one of the most experimental authors in contemporary American fiction. Barthelme was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His interest in art led him to become a museum director in Houston, Texas, in the 1950s, and he later served as managing editor of the art and literary periodical Location. Critics have noted that one of the main influences on Barthelme’s writing, both in form and theme, is the collage, an art of fragmentation, which he saw as the key to modern art (see Modern Art; Architecture). His novels include Snow White (1967), The Dead Father (1975), and Paradise (1986). His numerous collections of short stories include Come Back Dr. Caligari (1964); Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts (1968); City Life (1970); Sadness (1972); Great Days (1979); Sixty Stories (1981); Overnight to Many Distant Cities (1983); and Forty Stories (1987).


Barthelme’s works do not reflect a concern with plot, character, or theme, but rather have more to do with form. The author constructs a formal design in his works that is playful, inventive, and self-contained. For example, in one story he transforms the traditional fairy tale “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” so that the conventional notions of heroism and salvation are inverted. The Snow White of Barthelme’s story, rather than living happily ever after, never develops personally or finds happiness.


In many of his short stories—"On Angels," "Brain Damage," "A Shower of Gold," "Daumier"—Barthelme virtually changes our conception of the short story form, including drawings, "sermons," and descriptions of figures from popular culture. "On Angels" is one of Barthelme’s most characteristic stories. It begins with a telling statement; "The death of God left the angels in a strange position." The angels of the story, like Snow White in the other story, are outcasts, unsure of their position in the universe. The angels do not reach any self-definition, but they accept one principle—they will continue to exist in an imperfect way. Barthelme’s last work, The King, which places King Arthur and his Round Table in the nuclear age, was published posthumously in 1990.


Carver, Raymond (1939-1988), American writer, best known for his highly readable, intensely absorbing short stories. Carver’s background and the difficulties of his adult life provided much of the material for his writing, which frequently focuses on lost dreams, failed relationships, and disillusionment. He is recognized as one of the foremost short-story writers in the English language and is credited with reviving popular interest in the form in the 1980s.


Carver was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, to working-class parents. He began writing in 1958 after studying creative writing at Chico State College in California. He eventually earned a B.A. degree in 1963 from Humboldt State College. Before the publication of his first collection of short stories, Put Yourself in My Shoes (1974), Carver wrote two volumes of poetry, Near Klamath (1968) and Winter Insomnia (1970).


In the late 1960s and the 1970s, Carver was repeatedly hospitalized as a result of alcoholism. By drawing on these experiences for his writing, he achieved much of his early success, and many of the characters in his stories deal with difficulties related to drinking. When developing his stories, Carver often reworked them several times—for instance, the story “The Bath” eventually became the award-winning “A Small, Good Thing,” although Carver himself thought of them as two very different stories.


Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (1976) was Carver’s first commercially successful short-story collection. His other major collections are What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981), Cathedral (1983), and Where I’m Calling From (1988). Elements of hope and redemption are incorporated into the stories in Cathedral, marking a notable transition in Carver’s work. Carver’s last work, the volume of poetry A New Path to the Waterfall, was published posthumously in 1989. Some of his prose is collected in Fires (1983). All of Us: The Collected Poems was published in 1998.


Oates, Joyce Carol (1938- ), American author, known for the descriptive violence in her portrayals of American life. Born in Lockport, New York, Oates was educated at Syracuse University, the University of Wisconsin, and Rice University. She taught at the University of Detroit from 1961 to 1967 and at the University of Windsor from 1967 to 1987. She was a writer-in-residence at Princeton University from 1978 to 1981 and became a professor of English there in 1987.


Oates's first two volumes of short stories were By the North Gate (1963) and Upon the Sweeping Flood (1966). Her first novel, With Shuddering Fall, was published in 1964. Her novel them (1969), the third book in a trilogy that also included A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967) and Expensive People (1968), won the National Book Award in 1970. Oates wrote in many genres, but most of her books have strong elements of naturalism, a literary style emphasizing an objective presentation of life. Gothic elements, emphasizing the mysterious and horrifying aspects of life, also appear frequently in Oates's writing. For example, violence, often male and sexual, consistently plays a prominent role in the lives of her characters. Oates's many other works include Bellefleur (1980), You Must Remember This (1988), Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart (1990), Black Water (1992), Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang (1993), What I Lived For (1994), Zombie (1995), George Bellows: American Artist (1995), Will You Always Love Me? (1996), and Man Crazy (1997).



Woolf, Virginia (1882-1941), Born Adeline Virginia Stephen in London, Woolf was the daughter of biographer and critic Leslie Stephen (later Sir Leslie) and Julia Jackson Duckworth. She was educated at home by her father. After his death in 1904, she, her sister Vanessa, and her brothers Adrian and Thoby moved to Bloomsbury, then a bohemian section of London. In 1912 she married Leonard Woolf, a critic and writer on economics and politics. Virginia Woolf, her husband, her siblings, and their friends became known as the Bloomsbury Group. Meeting frequently until about 1930, the group included novelist E. M. Forster, biographer and essayist Lytton Strachey, painter Duncan Grant, art critics Roger Fry and Clive Bell (Vanessa's husband), economist John Maynard Keynes, and editor Desmond McCarthy. Although the group shared certain values, it had no common doctrine. It was simply a number of friends, wrote McCarthy, "whose affection and respect for each other ... stood the test of thirty years, and whose intellectual candor made their company agreeable to each other."


In 1917 the Woolfs founded Hogarth Press, which became a successful publishing house, printing the early works of authors such as Forster, Katherine Mansfield, and T. S. Eliot, and introducing the works of Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis, to English readers. Except for the first printing of Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out (1915), Hogarth Press also published all of her works.


From the time of her mother’s death in 1895, Woolf suffered from what is now believed to have been bipolar disorder, which is characterized by alternating moods of mania and depression. In 1941, at the apparent onset of a period of depression, Woolf drowned herself in the Ouse River. She left her husband a note explaining that she feared she was going mad and this time would not recover.


II ELEMENTS OF THE SHORT STORY

The basic elements of the short story include setting (time and place), conflict, character, and theme. Most stories are set in present day, but settings of place vary from rural to urban and exotic to mundane. The reader follows the main character (or protagonist) in a conflict with another character (or antagonist) or in an internal conflict with some antagonistic psychological or spiritual force. Characters range from familiar stereotypes, such as the aggressive businessman and the lonely housewife, to archetypal characters, such as the rebel, the scapegoat, the alter ego, and those engaged in some sort of search.

The subject of a short story is often mistaken for its theme. Common subjects for modern short fiction include race, ethnic status, gender, class, and social issues such as poverty, drugs, violence, and divorce. These subjects allow the writer to comment upon the larger theme that is the heart of the fictional work. Some of the major themes of 20th-century short stories, as well as longer forms of fiction, are human isolation, alienation, and personal trauma, such as anxiety; love and hate; male-female relationships; family and the conflict of generations; initiation from innocence to experience; friendship and brotherhood; illusion and reality; self-delusion and self-discovery; the individual in conflict with society’s institutions; mortality; spiritual struggles; and even the relationship between life and art.

III ART OF THE SHORT STORY

The art of the short story employs the techniques of point of view, style, plot and structure, and a wide range of devices that stimulate emotional, imaginative, and intellectual responses in the reader. The writer’s choice and control of these techniques determines the reader’s overall experience.

A Point of View

The three basic point-of-view techniques are omniscient (the all-knowing author narrates), first person (the author lets one of his characters narrate), and central intelligence (the author filters the narrative through the perceptions of a single character). A seldom-used point-of-view technique is the objective (the author poses as a purely objective observer, never giving the reader access to a character’s thoughts), as in “The Secret Room” (1962) by French writer Alain Robbe-Grillet, in which the author grimly describes a painting that depicts a murder.

American expatriate writer Henry James developed a number of theories about fiction that influenced generations of short-story writers, including Irish writer James Joyce, British short-story specialist Katherine Mansfield, and Americans John O’Hara, Katherine Anne Porter, John Updike, and John Cheever. In “The Art of Fiction,” a magazine article published in 1884, James described a new type of point of view, third-person central intelligence, in which all the elements of a story are filtered through the perceptions, emotions, imagination, and thoughts of the main character. This view conveys a sense of immediacy and psychological realism, as in James’s own brilliant story, “The Beast in the Jungle” (1903). Joyce’s innovations with point of view and style helped change the course of literature in the 20th century with a single book of short stories, Dubliners (1914). These stories offer painfully truthful representations of life in Joyce’s native city using a technique from painting called impressionism, which conveys a fleeting emotional or intellectual perception of the world.

Among early forms of first-person point-of-view narration are epistolary (letters), diary, and memoir (another first-person format—the journal entry—is relatively recent). In the 1879 story “A Bundle of Letters,” Henry James experimented with the epistolary point of view by presenting the story through a series of letters written by six persons living in a French boarding house. Interior monologue (author focuses on a character’s thoughts) and dramatic monologue (author lets the character speak to one or more identified or unidentified listeners) are other forms of first-person point of view, although these are not very common. The first-person narrator is usually identified but can be anonymous, and even ambiguous as to gender, as in the story “Termitary” (1974) by South African writer Nadine Gordimer. Usually a single character narrates, but sometimes there are as many as ten (as in “Just Like a Tree” by Ernest Gaines, 1962), or even nonhuman characters (as in Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s “Hook,” 1941). Readers often mistake the statements of a first-person narrator for those of the author, who frequently creates an unreliable narrator with ironic results.

Additional Information:

James, Henry (1843-1916), American expatriate writer, whose masterly fiction juxtaposed American innocence and European experience in a series of intense, psychologically complex works. James's work is characterized by leisurely pacing and subtle delineation of character rather than by dramatic incidents or complicated plots. His major writings, highly sensitive examples of the objective psychological novel, deal with the world of leisure and sophistication he had grown to know intimately in Europe.

Henry, the younger brother of philosopher William James, was born in New York City and educated in New York, London, Paris, and Geneva. In 1875 he settled permanently in England, and in 1915 he became a British subject. While still in his early 20s he began to contribute short stories and articles to American periodicals. The American novelist William Dean Howells encouraged him and introduced his work to the magazine The Atlantic Monthly.

In his early novels and tales, James's theme was the impact of European culture on Americans traveling or living abroad. Examples from this phase are Roderick Hudson (1876), The American (1877), Daisy Miller (1879), and The Portrait of a Lady (1881). In time James began to explore the types and manners of the English scene, as in The Tragic Muse (1890), The Spoils of Poynton (1897), and The Awkward Age (1899). His last three great novels, The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904), again take up the theme of contrast between American and European societies. In general, the style of his later works is complex, with the motives and behavior of his characters revealed obliquely by means of their conversations and through their minute observations of one another. Although meaningful dialogue is characteristic of his literary style, James's stage writings were failures. However, several of his works have been successfully dramatized and adapted for films, including two of his many tales, “The Aspern Papers” (1888) and “The Turn of the Screw” (1898), and two of his most famous novels, The Europeans (1878) and Washington Square (1881).

James was a prolific author, and his writing includes, in addition to fiction, a substantial body of literary criticism and travel essays, notably English Hours (1905) and The American Scene (1907), impressions of his native country after an absence of 20 years. His letters, edited by the American scholar Leon Edel, were published in four volumes (1974-1984). James's reputation as a major force in English and American literature was not firmly established until the 1940s. Particularly responsible for increased interest in James is Edel's prizewinning five-volume biography Life of Henry James (1953-1972). In 1976 a plaque was dedicated to James in Westminster Abbey's Poets' Corner

B Style

Style is the author’s careful choice of words and arrangement of words, sentences, and paragraphs to produce a specific effect on the reader. An author’s style evolves out of the chosen point-of-view technique. The omniscient point of view produces a relatively complex style; the first-person point of view results in a simple style if it is recorded as “spoken,” more complex if written; and central intelligence generates a style that typically is slightly elevated above the intelligence level of the focal character. The simple, economical style of American Ernest Hemingway and his selection of images reveal subtle shifts in his characters’ psychological states. Hemingway’s style was particularly effective first-person narration, as in the famous opening paragraph of the 1927 story “In Another Country”:

In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more. It was cold in the fall in Milan and the dark came very early. Then the electric lights came on and it was pleasant along the streets looking in the windows. There was much game hanging outside the shops, and the snow powdered in the fur of the foxes and the wind blew their tails. The deer hung stiff and heavy and empty, and small birds blew in the wind and the wind turned their feathers. It was a cold fall and the wind came down from the mountains.

Additional Information:

Hemingway, Ernest Miller (1899-1961), American novelist and short-story writer, whose style is characterized by crispness, laconic dialogue, and emotional understatement. Hemingway's writings and his personal life exerted a profound influence on American writers of his time. Many of his works are regarded as classics of American literature, and some have been made into motion pictures.


Born in Oak Park, Illinois, Hemingway was educated at Oak Park High School. After graduating from high school in 1917, he became a reporter for the Kansas City Star, but he left his job within a few months to serve as a volunteer ambulance driver in Italy during World War I (1914-1918). He later transferred to the Italian infantry and was severely wounded. After the war he served as a correspondent for the Toronto Star and then settled in Paris. While there, he was encouraged in creative work by the American expatriate writers Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. After 1927 Hemingway spent long periods of time in Key West, Florida, and in Spain and Africa. During the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), he returned to Spain as a newspaper correspondent. In World War II (1939-1945) he again was a correspondent and later was a reporter for the United States First Army; although he was not a soldier, he participated in several battles. After the war Hemingway settled near Havana, Cuba, and in 1958 he moved to Ketchum, Idaho.


Hemingway drew heavily on his experiences as an avid fisherman, hunter, and bullfight enthusiast (see Bullfighting) in his writing. His adventurous life brought him close to death several times: in the Spanish Civil War when shells burst inside his hotel room; in World War II when he was struck by a taxi during a blackout; and in 1954 when his airplane crashed in Africa.


C Plot and Structure

There is a wide range of plot forms and structures found in the short story. A traditional plot has a beginning (introduction of the problem), middle (development of the problem), and an end (resolution of the problem). Some writers venture into less predictable plots, such as Canadian Margaret Atwood in her “Significant Moments in the Life of My Mother” (1983) which is seemingly plotless but deliberately divided into 13 brief episodes. Some authors complicate the structure of their plots with the use of flashbacks and flash-forwards; with a frame that encloses the story (a story within a story); or with subplots (secondary storylines) or double plots (two or more equally important narratives progressing simultaneously, usually converging at the end). Among other devices that enhance plot structure are foreshadowing, reversals of fortune, digressions, abrupt transitions, and juxtapositions of contrasting characters or settings.

Deliberate ambiguity (open-endedness), as opposed to unambiguous resolutions (closed-endedness), is a plot feature of many modern stories. The surprise endings of French author Guy de Maupassant, as in his 1884 story “The Necklace,” influenced many commercial writers but also some literary ones. At the turn of the century, American author O. Henry became famous for his paradoxical style and surprise endings, such as in “A Gift of the Magi” (1905). American writer William Faulkner used the surprise ending to complex and serious effect in “A Rose for Emily” (1931).

Additional Information:

Henry, O., pseudonym of William Sydney Porter (1862-1910), American writer of short stories, best known for his ironic plot twists and surprise endings. Born and raised in Greensboro, North Carolina, O. Henry attended school only until age 15, when he dropped out to work in his uncle’s drugstore. During his 20s he moved to Texas, where he worked for more than ten years as a clerk and a bank teller. O. Henry did not write professionally until he reached his mid-30s, when he sold several pieces to the Detroit Free Press and the Houston Daily Post. In 1894 he founded a short-lived weekly humor magazine, The Rolling Stone.


In 1896 O. Henry was charged with embezzling funds from the First National Bank of Austin, Texas, where he had worked from 1891 to 1894. The amount of money was small and might have been an accounting error; however, he chose to flee to Honduras rather than stand trial. Learning that his wife was dying, he returned to Texas in 1897 and, after her death, turned himself in to authorities. He served three years of a five-year sentence at the federal penitentiary in Columbus, Ohio, where he first began to write short stories and use the pseudonym O. Henry.


Released from prison, O. Henry moved to New York City in 1901 and began writing full time. In his stories he made substantial use of his knowledge of Texas, Central America, and life in prison. He also became fascinated by New York street life, which provided a setting for many of his later stories. During the last ten years of his life, O. Henry became one of the most popular writers in America, publishing over 500 short stories in dozens of widely read periodicals.


O. Henry’s most famous stories, such as “The Gift of the Magi,” “The Furnished Room,” and “The Ransom of Red Chief,” make simple yet effective use of paradoxical coincidences to produce ironic endings. For example, in “The Gift of the Magi” a husband sells his watch to buy his wife a Christmas present of a pair of hair combs; unbeknownst to him, she cuts and sells her long hair to buy him a Christmas present of a new chain for his watch. His style of storytelling became a model not only for short fiction, but also for American motion pictures and television programs.


Writing at the rate of more than one story per week, O. Henry published ten collections of stories during a career that barely spanned a decade. They are Cabbages and Kings (1904), The Four Million (1906), Heart of the West (1907), The Trimmed Lamp (1907), The Gentle Grafter (1908), The Voice of the City (1908), Options (1909), Roads of Destiny (1909), Whirligigs (1910), and Strictly Business (1910). The collections Sixes and Sevens (1911), Rolling Stones (1912), and Waifs and Strays (1917) were published after his death. In 1919 the O. Henry Memorial Awards for the best American short stories published each year were founded by the Society of Arts and Sciences. The Complete Works of O. Henry was published in 1953.


Faulkner, William (1897-1962), American novelist, known for his epic portrayal, in some 20 novels, of the tragic conflict between the old and the new South. Faulkner's complex plots and narrative style alienated many readers of his early works, but he was recognized later as one of the greatest American writers.


Born in New Albany, Mississippi, Faulkner was raised in nearby Oxford as the oldest of four sons of an old-line southern family. In 1915 he dropped out of high school, which he detested, to work in his grandfather's bank. In World War I (1914-1918) he joined the Royal Canadian Air Force but never saw battle action. Back home in Oxford, he was admitted to the University of Mississippi as a veteran, but he soon quit school to write, supporting himself with odd jobs.


Faulkner's first book, The Marble Faun, a collection of pastoral poems, was privately printed in 1924. The following year he moved to New Orleans, worked as a journalist, and met the American short-story writer Sherwood Anderson, who helped him find a publisher for his first novel, Soldier's Pay (1926), and also convinced him to write about the people and places he knew best. After a brief tour of Europe, Faulkner returned home and began his series of baroque, brooding novels set in the mythical Yoknapatawpha County (based on Lafayette County, Mississippi), peopling it with his own ancestors, Native Americans, blacks, shadowy backwoods hermits, and loutish poor whites. In the first of these novels, Sartoris (1929), he patterned the character Colonel Sartoris after his own great-grandfather, William Cuthbert Falkner, a soldier, politician, railroad builder, and author. (Faulkner restored the “u” that had been removed from the family name.)


The year 1929 was crucial to Faulkner. That year Sartoris was followed by The Sound and the Fury, an account of the tragic downfall of the Compson family. The novel uses four different narrative voices to piece together the story and thus challenges the reader by presenting a fragmented plot told from multiple points of view. The structure of The Sound and the Fury presaged the narrative innovations Faulkner would explore throughout his career. Also in 1929 Faulkner married his childhood sweetheart, Estelle Oldham, and made his home in the small town of Oxford, Mississippi. Most of the books he wrote over the rest of his life received favorable reviews, but only one, Sanctuary (1931), sold well. Despite its sensationalism and brutality, its underlying concerns were with corruption and disillusionment. The book's success led to lucrative work as a scriptwriter for Hollywood, which, for a short time, freed Faulkner to write his novels as his imagination dictated. Faulkner's two most successful screenplays were written for movies that were directed by Howard Hawks: To Have and Have Not (1945, adapted from the novel by the American writer Ernest Hemingway) and The Big Sleep (1946, adapted from the novel by the American writer Raymond Chandler).


Faulkner's works demanded much of his readers. To create a mood, he might let one of his complex, convoluted sentences run on for more than a page. He juggled time, spliced narratives, experimented with multiple narrators, and interrupted simple stories with rambling, stream-of-consciousness soliloquies. Consequently, his readership dwindled. In 1946 the critic Malcolm Cowley, concerned that Faulkner was insufficiently known and appreciated, put together The Portable Faulkner, arranging extracts from Faulkner's novels into a chronological sequence that gave the entire Yoknapatawpha saga a new clarity, thus making Faulkner's genius accessible to a new generation of readers.


Faulkner's works, long out of print, began to be reissued. No longer was he regarded as a regional curiosity, but as a literary giant whose finest writing held meaning far beyond the agonies and conflicts of his own troubled South. His accomplishment was internationally recognized in 1949, when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. His major works include As I Lay Dying (1930), the story of a family's journey to bury a mother; Light in August (1932); Absalom, Absalom! (1936), about Thomas Sutpen's attempt to found a Southern dynasty; The Unvanquished (1938); The Hamlet (1940), the first novel in a trilogy about the rise of the Snopes family; Go Down Moses (1942), a collection of Yoknapatawpha County stories of which the novella The Bear is the best known; Intruder in the Dust (1948); A Fable (1954); The Town (1957) and The Mansion (1959), which completed the Snopes trilogy; and The Reivers (1962). Faulkner especially was interested in multigenerational family chronicles, and many characters appear in more than one book; this gives the Yoknapatawpha County saga a sense of continuity that makes the area and its inhabitants seem real. Faulkner continued to write—both novels and short stories—until his death.


D Devices

Writers employ a wide range of rhetorical devices for contrast and emphasis, including paradox, metaphor, and patterns of imagery, repeated motifs, symbolism, and irony. The power of Katherine Anne Porter’s “Flowering Judas” (1930) derives in part from her overt use of symbolism. Irony provides the reader with a contrast between reality and the fallibility of human perception, which is at the heart of most modern fiction. American writer Flannery O’Connor is a master of irony, as in the story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” (1953) in which a manipulative grandmother imposes her will on a situation, with the ironic result that she and her family are killed by escaped convicts.

Additional Information:

Porter, Katherine Anne (1890-1980), American writer, generally regarded as one of the leading modern writers of short stories. Born in Indian Creek, near San Antonio, Texas, Porter was educated at private schools. In the 1920s and 1930s, she contributed articles to various newspapers while living in the United States, Europe, and Mexico. Porter's first collection of short stories, Flowering Judas (1930), was quickly acclaimed. These stories, some with Mexican settings, were praised for their psychological insight and technical excellence. Porter's other story collections include Hacienda (1934); Noon Wine (1937); Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939); and Collected Stories (1965), which was awarded the 1966Pulitzer Prize in fiction. Porter's meticulous construction of complex situations and feelings established her as a leading stylist of her time. Many of her works portray an individual's search for understanding and freedom in an oppressive world. Porter was particularly noted for her ability to universalize individual experience. Although she did not write confessional fiction, many of her stories were based in part on her own experiences, and in several of her stories she reinvented herself as the character Miranda. Collected Essays and Occasional Writings of Katherine Anne Porter appeared in 1970. Porter's only novel, Ship of Fools (1962), depicting a voyage on an ocean liner on the eve of World War II (1939-1945), was made into a motion picture in 1965.

O’Connor, (Mary) Flannery (1925-1964), American writer, whose novels and short stories focusing on humanity's spiritual deformity and flight from redemption earned her a unique place in 20th-century American fiction.


Born in Savannah, Georgia, O'Connor was educated at the Georgia State College for Women and the State University of Iowa (now called the University of Iowa). Most of her life was spent in Milledgeville, Georgia, where she raised peacocks and wrote. O'Connor's work, essentially two novels and two volumes of short stories, has been described as an unlikely mixture of southern Gothic, prophecy, and evangelistic Roman Catholicism. The novels are Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960); the short-story collections are A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955) and Everything that Rises Must Converge (published posthumously, 1965). O'Connor is frequently compared to the American novelist William Faulkner for her portrayal of southern character and milieu and to the Austrian writer Franz Kafka for her preoccupation with the grotesque. A basic theme of her work is the individual's vain attempt to escape the grace of God, and her work is profoundly and pervasively religious. She died of lupus, a disease that crippled her for the last ten years of her life.


IV STORY TYPES

Among the ways of looking at the subjects, themes, and art of the short story is to review the astonishing range and varieties of types of stories. These include tales, fantasies, humor and satire, character studies, confession, biography, history, education, religion, and local color types.

The ancient form of the tale can retain its power when used for the modern short story, as in “The She-Wolf” (1880) by Italian writer Giovanni Verga and “Mrs. Li’s Hair,” by Chinese writer Yeh Shao-Chun. Fantasy stories often combine the old tales tradition with supernatural details, as in the horror fantasy of British writer John Collier (for example, “Bottle Party,” 1939), Irish author Elizabeth Bowen (“The Demon Lover,” 1941), and British writer Saki (“Tobermory,” 1911). Other notable fantasies are “The Sailor-Boy’s Tale” (1942) by Danish author Isak Dinesen, “The Door” (1939) by American E. B. White, and “The Celestial Omnibus” (1908) by British writer E. M. Forster.

Another short story type is the humor story, intended to surprise, delight, and entertain; a related type of story, the satire, is designed to attack the ills of society. Some of the more famous humorous tall tales and animal fables were written by Americans Mark Twain (“The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” 1865) and Joel Chandler Harris (“The Wonderful Tar-Baby Story,” 1894). Modern small towns are the setting for the sardonic humor of stories by American James Thurber (“The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” 1942, among many others) and Anglo-American P. G. Wodehouse (the Wooster and Jeeves stories, first appearing in 1914). More serious humor is at work in stories by Americans Eudora Welty (such as “Petrified Man,” 1939) and Dorothy Parker (“The Custard Heart,” 1939). Good examples of writers who produced stories of sober satire include Austrian author Arthur Schnitzler (“Fate of the Baron,” 1923) and American Mary McCarthy (“The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt,” 1941).

Some short stories are character studies, such as “The Gentleman from San Francisco” (1921) by Russian writer Ivan Bunin. Others are lyrical expressions of a character’s emotional state as in “First Love” (originally “Colette,” 1948) by Russian American author Vladimir Nabokov. Another type is the confession story, often done without the narrator’s awareness, as in “First Confession” (1944) by Irish writer Frank O’Connor. Still other stories fall under biography or history types, in which a life story or historical event is used for a work of fiction; Welty’s “A Still Moment” (a 1943 story about naturalist John James Audubon) falls into both categories.

The education story is set in academia or is concerned with the education of the main character, as in “Of This Time, of That Place” (1944) by American educator Lionel Trilling. The religion story can be either faithful to and supportive of organized religion or critical of it; “God Sees the Truth but Waits” (1872) by Russian Leo Tolstoy is of the faithful variety, but “The Sin of Jesus” (1955) by fellow Russian Isaac Babel is critical and questioning. There are also religious fantasies, such as “The Gardener” (1926) by British author Rudyard Kipling. Most of the stories of Americans Flannery O’Connor and J. F. Powers emerge out of a Catholic religious context.

Local color stories examine the mores and customs of rural and small-town life, sometimes sentimentally, as with the stories of Maria Edgeworth, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Sarah Orne Jewett, and George Washington Cable. The hardboiled first-person narrators of stories set in the big cities are often tough guys, as in James M. Cain’s “Dead Man” (1936), the many wisecracking stories of Dashiell Hammett and Damon Runyon, the more serious tough stories of Ring Lardner, and the literary stories of John O’Hara.

The short story was once a common publishing staple; many women’s, men’s, and family magazines and some newspapers regularly published the form from the 1840s to the 1960s. During this time the most popular mainstream genres were Western, crime, and romance, with science fiction, fantasy, horror, and occult stories a cut below. The most famous short-story writer of this period was O. Henry, just as Stephen King’s bestselling stories of the occult are the most well-known today. But literary writers have always published stories within the commercial genres. Such writers include American Edgar Allan Poe (horror), Britons Aldous Huxley and H. G. Wells (science fiction), Briton C. S. Lewis and American Ray Bradbury (science fiction and fantasy), and Americans Walter Van Tilburg Clark and Stephen Crane (Westerns).

The short story cycle, a series of stories unified not by plot but by the reappearance of a central character or characters in the same locale, was developed by Sherwood Anderson in his collection Winesburg, Ohio (1919), by Hemingway in his Nick Adams stories, by Faulkner in his Quentin Compson stories, and by American writer John Steinbeck in The Long Valley (1938). Russian author Mikhail Lermontov focuses on character study in his cycle of stories A Hero of Our Time (1840). A Sportsman’s Sketches (1852) is a cycle of tales by Russian Ivan Turgenev in which a huntsman’s visits to various rural locales are used to paint a picture of Russian life during that time. The American author J. D. Salinger also produced a story cycle about the adventures of the eccentric Glass family, collected in books such as Nine Stories (1953) and Franny and Zooey (1961).

Additional Information:

Saki (author), pseudonym of Hector Hugh Munro (1870-1916), British writer, born in Burma (now known as Myanmar), and educated in England. In 1894 he joined the editorial staff of the London newspaper Westminster Gazette for which he wrote a series of lightly satirical political sketches reminiscent of the writings of the English author Lewis Carroll. The highly popular articles were collected as The Westminster Alice (1902). He enlisted in the British army at the outbreak of World War I and was killed in action in France. Saki is best known as a writer of short stories, many of which have fantastic settings and characters. They are distinguished by an urbane wit and delicate, often biting irony. A collected edition, the Short Stories of Saki, was posthumously published in 1930. Among his other published works are the novels The Unbearable Bassington (1912) and When William Came (1913).

Forster, E(dward) M(organ) (1879-1970), English novelist and essayist, whose novels, written in a style notable for its conciseness and fluidity, explore the attitudes that create barriers between people.


Forster was born in London on January 1, 1879, and educated at King's College, University of Cambridge. After a short residence in Italy, he turned to writing full time. His first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), appeared when Forster was 26 years old and displays remarkably mature style. This was followed by The Longest Journey (1907) and A Room with a View (1908). The construction of these three novels was a reaction to lengthy, formally plotted Victorian fiction. Somewhat autobiographical, they also sounded a theme prevalent in Forster's essays: the need to temper middle-class materialism with due consideration of things of the mind and imagination, in order to achieve harmony and understanding. This theme is treated more fully in Forster's masterpieces, Howards End (1910), with its message “Only connect,” and A Passage to India (1924). The latter, the last novel Forster wrote, deals with the conflict of cultures in terms of the ambiguous personal relationship between an English visitor and an Indian during British rule.

Two volumes of short stories were published by Forster during his lifetime, The Celestial Omnibus (1914) and The Eternal Moment (1924). Maurice (1971; written 1913-1914), a novel, and The Life to Come (1972; written throughout his life), a collection of short stories, both primarily on homosexual themes, were not published until after Forster's death.

Forster's convictions and outlook were clearly expressed in his essay collections, Abinger Harvest (1936) and Two Cheers for Democracy (1951), as well as in his travel books, The Hill of Devi (1953), an account of his sojourn in India and the real basis for A Passage to India, and Alexandria: A History and a Guide (1922; revised 1961). The latter was based on Forster's civilian duties there during World War I (1914-1918). A variety of other literary endeavors included editorship, for a brief period after World War I, of the Daily Herald, a Labour Party newspaper; the libretto for the opera Billy Budd (1951), by the English composer Benjamin Britten; and an important piece of literary criticism, Aspects of the Novel, based on lectures he gave at Cambridge in 1927.

Forster, an honorary fellow of King's College, resided there from 1946 until his death in Coventry, England on June 7, 1970. Forster's critical reputation has remained high, and popular interest in his novels has been fueled by the recent films made from his works: A Passage to India (1984); A Room with a View (1985); Maurice (1987); Where Angels Fear to Tread (1991); and Howards End (1992).

Anderson, Sherwood (1876-1941), American author, born in Camden, Ohio. He left school at the age of 14 and worked at various jobs until 1898. He served in Cuba during the Spanish-American War (1898). After the war he went to Chicago, Illinois, where he began to write novels and poetry. His work won praise from American writers Theodore Dreiser, Carl Sandburg, and Ben Hecht.


Anderson's talent was not widely recognized until the publication of the collection of his short stories Winesburg, Ohio (1919), which deals with the instinctive, if inarticulate, struggle of ordinary people to assert their individuality in the face of standardization imposed by the machine age. Noted for his poetic realism, psychological insight, and sense of the tragic, Anderson helped also to establish a simple, consciously naive short-story style. His choice of subject matter and style influenced many American writers who followed him, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner. Anderson's other works include several novels, short stories, and essays. His autobiographies are Tar, a Midwest Childhood (1926) and Sherwood Anderson's Memoirs (1942).

V CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES

The critical approaches that scholars and teachers use to analyze the short story include both traditional and new perspectives, which are sometimes similar in name to the various story types. Among the traditional ways in which scholars can approach and analyze short stories are naturalism (as in “Paul’s Case,” 1905, by American Willa Cather), philosophical (“One of the Missing,” 1891, by American Ambrose Bierce), social criticism (“Early Sorrow,” 1929, by German writer Thomas Mann), war (“Patriotism,” 1961, by Japan’s Mishima Yukio and American Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried,” 1986), impressionistic (Katherine Mansfield’s “Bliss,” 1920), and symbolic (“The Destructors,” 1954, by British writer Graham Greene).

Scholars have applied the terms Southern gothic and Southern grotesque to the short stories of the American South, which has a rich literary history. The term Gothic derives from 19th-century novels, mostly by British novelists, that are set in castles or huge houses in an atmosphere of menace and the supernatural. The term grotesque derives from 19th-century French fiction such as Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame and from Sherwood Anderson’s characters in Winesburg, Ohio (1919). These settings and characters are often echoed in Southern fiction, with Civil War-era mansions and characters that are physically or mentally grotesque. Faulkner’s stories often fall under this category, as they probe the deep recesses of the human psyche while experimenting with fictional forms. In one piece, “That Evening Sun” (1931), Faulkner traces a surface story about a black woman’s fear of a violent death and, simultaneously, a submerged psychological process in the young male narrator, who begins with a very complex literary style and lapses into a childlike state as he recalls witnessing his family’s reactions to the black woman’s behavior.

Intriguing comparisons have sometimes been made between Southern gothic and Southern grotesque stories and the South American style of magic realism, which thrives on the bizarre, mingling realism and fantasy. Writers who have contributed to the development of this mode include Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar, both from Argentina; Clarice Lispector, a Brazilian writer; and especially Gabriel García Márquez of Colombia (“A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings,” 1955).

Some of the critical perspectives of more recent origin are race and ethnicity, gender, class, psychology, politics, and colonialism. The psychological or Freudian perspective might be used to look at “The Interior Castle” (1947) by Jean Stafford; “Going to Meet the Man,” (1965) by American James Baldwin, is about racial identity; “The Rocking Horse Winner,” (1926), by American D. H. Lawrence, mingles fantasy with implications about class. Tillie Olsen and Doris Lessing are only two of many short-story writers whose work is studied from a feminist perspective. A radical political, Marxist perspective might illuminate Frank O’Connor’s “Guests of the Nation” (1931) and “The Guest” (1958) by French writer Albert Camus. Topical social problems, such as drugs, violence, and child and spousal abuse, are also often related to race, gender, and class concerns.

In the United States focus upon ethnic short stories began in the 1950s with attention to Jewish life: Saul Bellow (“Looking for Mr. Green,” 1951), Bernard Malamud (“The Magic Barrel,” 1955), and Philip Roth (“Defender of the Faith,” 1960) are all Americans known for their depiction of modern Jewish life in the United States. Polish-born American writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, on the other hand, reaches back to Jewish experiences in the old country as well, as in “Gimpel the Fool” (1953). Amos Oz, one of the major Israeli writers, renders the Jewish experience as it interacts with that of Muslims in the story “Nomad and Viper” (1965).

The ethnic perspective in the United States became much sharper in the mid-1960s, with African American writers receiving the most attention. However, there have been brilliant African American writers working since the Civil War (1861-1865), including Charles Chesnutt (“The Wife of His Youth,” 1898), Zora Neal Hurston (“The Gilded Six-Bits,” 1933-1934), Richard Wright (“Almo’s a Man,” 1936), and Ralph Ellison (“King of the Bingo Game,” 1944). Important African American voices since the 1960s include Ernest Gaines (“The Sky Is Gray,” 1963), Ann Petry (“The Witness,” 1971), Toni Morrison (“The Bluest Eye,” story which became the 1970 novel), and Alice Walker (“Everyday Use,” 1973). New voices in this tradition continue to emerge.

The proliferation of Chicano and Mexican short stories is a literary phenomenon dating to the 1970s, and includes writers such as Rudolfo Anaya (“The Silence of the Llano,” 1982), Denise Chavez (“Willow Game,” 1980), Raymond Barrio (“The Campesinos”), and Richard Vasquez (“Angelina Sandoval”). Generally, less attention is given to the Native American short story, whose authors are fewer; two of notes are Leslie Marmon Silko (“Yellow Woman,” 1974) and Louise Erdrich (“The Red Convertible,” 1984). Asian American writers such as Frank Chin (“Food for All His Dead,” 1962) and Maxine Hong Kingston (“No Name Woman,” 1975) also have emerged as an ethnic focus of study.

Outside the United States, Ireland has a strong tradition of ethnic short stories. Top Irish short-story writers include Seán O’Faoláin (“Innocence,” 1948), Mary Lavin (“The Great Wave,” 1961), William Trevor (“The Ballroom of Romance,” 1972), and Edna O’Brien (“A Journey,” 1975).

Interest in short stories from the various nations and cultures of Africa has been growing since the late 1950s. Stories from sub-Saharan Africa often combine wild fancy, stark realism, and, often, political commentary. One of the most famous African writers is Nigerian Achebe, whose “Civil Peace” (1972) depicts the turbulent aftermath of civil war. Doris Lessing, raised in what is now Zimbabwe, is known for her African Stories (1964). From South Africa, Nadine Gordimer has written many disturbing stories of family and race relationships that examine the social and political tensions in her country, as in the collection Something Out There (1984).

Additional Information:

Greene, (Henry) Graham (1904-1991), English novelist, concerned with spiritual struggle in a deteriorating world. Born in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, the son of a headmaster, Greene was educated at the University of Oxford. He worked for the London Times from 1926 to 1929 and then as a free-lance writer. In 1935 he was film critic for the Spectator, a British newspaper, and in 1940 he was named literary editor. From 1942 to 1943 he worked for the British Foreign Office in western Africa and after World War II (1939-1945) he traveled widely.


Greene's earliest novels were The Man Within (1929), The Name of Action (1930), and Rumour at Nightfall (1931). His popularity came, however, with Stamboul Train (1932), a spy thriller published in the United States as Orient Express. This and subsequent novels such as England Made Me (1935) and The Ministry of Fear (1943), Greene later categorized as “entertainments.”A Gun for Sale (1936), published in the United States as This Gun for Hire, has as a central theme man's conflict between good and evil. It may be considered a precursor to the type of book that Greene specifically labeled as “novels.” These writings are seriously concerned with the moral, social, and religious problems of the time. Greene himself had been converted to Roman Catholicism in 1926. The “novels” include Brighton Rock (1938); The Power and the Glory (1940), first published in the United States as The Labyrinthine Ways, his own favorite work; The Heart of the Matter (1948); and The End of the Affair (1951).


Subsequent major works by Greene include The Quiet American (1955), Our Man in Havana (1958), A Burnt-out Case (1961), The Comedians (1966), The Honorary Consul (1973), The Human Factor (1978), and The Tenth Man (1985). Many of his novels have been adapted for motion pictures; The Third Man (1950), another spy thriller, was written specifically for filming. As an essayist, he compiled Lost Childhood and Other Essays (1952) and Collected Essays (1969), the latter mostly comprising studies of other writers. He also wrote books for children. Among his plays are The Living Room (1953), The Potting Shed (1957), and The Complaisant Lover (1959). A Sort of Life (1971) and its sequel Ways of Escape (1980) are his autobiographies.


Greene's works are characterized by vivid detail, a variety of settings (Mexico, Africa, Haiti, Vietnam), and a detached objective portrayal of characters under various forms of social, political, or psychological stress. Evil is omnipresent. In later novels, a dimension of moral doubt and conflict add to the terror and suspense. The 1982 novel Monsignor Quixote, which confronts Marxism with Catholicism, is gentler in tone. A World of My Own: A Dream Diary (1994), written by Greene in the final months of his life, is a partly fictitious, partly autobiographical work based on 800 pages of diaries kept over a 24-year span.


Camus, Albert (1913-1960), French-Algerian novelist, essayist, dramatist, and journalist, a Nobel laureate whose concepts of the absurd and of human revolt address and suggest solutions to the problem of meaninglessness in modern human life.


Camus was born at Mondovi (now Drean), Algeria, to a French father and a Spanish mother. After his father was killed in 1914, at the beginning of World War I, Camus was raised in poverty by his grandmother and his mother, an illiterate charwoman. Tuberculosis put an end to his studies at the University of Algiers, forcing him also to abandon soccer and to curtail his life in the theater as a playwright, director, and actor. These activities were the passions of his youth. Camus then became interested in politics, was briefly a member of the Communist Party, and in the 1930s began a career in journalism.


Camus’s articles revealing the misery of the Arab population in Algeria led to his dismissal from his newspaper job in Algiers. In 1940 he accompanied his friend and colleague Pascal Pia to Paris to work for the newspaper Paris-Soir. Soon he became involved in the Resistance movement against the occupying German forces, and he began writing for the underground newspaper Combat in 1943 (he served as managing editor from 1944 to 1947). He also published his first major works. Although Camus was associated with the group of writers surrounding French writer and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, he and Sartre always agreed that Camus did not belong to the philosophical movement known as existentialism, of which Sartre was a major proponent. His attack on Stalinist Communism in L’homme révolté (1951; translated as The Rebel, 1957) ended his friendship with Sartre, who at that time still supported Stalin, and alienated Camus from the French political left. In 1957 he received the Nobel Prize for literature. Deeply troubled during his last years by the Algerian war for independence (1954-1962), he immersed himself in the theater and in work on an autobiographical novel (Le premier homme, 1994; The First Man, 1995). He was about to be named director of a national theater at the time of his death in an automobile accident.



Borges, Jorge Luis (1899-1986), Argentine writer, whose challenging and unconventional poetry and fiction made him one of the foremost figures in 20th-century literature. In his writing Borges created a fantastic, totally subjective, and deeply metaphysical world. Describing his work, Borges wrote, “I am neither a thinker nor a moralist, but simply a man of letters who turns his own perplexities and that respected system of perplexities we call philosophy into the forms of literature.”


Born in Buenos Aires, the son of a teacher, Borges was educated in Geneva, Switzerland, and lived briefly in Spain. In 1921 he returned to Argentina, where he helped found several literary and philosophical periodicals and wrote lyrical poetry on historical Argentine themes. His collections included Fervor de Buenos Aires (Fervor of Buenos Aires, 1923), Luna de enfrente (The Moon Opposite, 1925), and Cuarderno San Martín (San Martin Notebook, 1929).


In the 1930s Borges's health failed as a result of a head wound, and he gradually lost his sight. Nevertheless, he worked at the National Library from 1938 to 1947 and served as its director from 1955 to 1973. Beginning in 1955, he also taught English at the University of Buenos Aires. During these years Borges turned from poetry to the short narrative fiction for which he is now famous. Ficciones (1945; translated into English, 1962) is perhaps his most important collection of short stories. Others are El Aleph (1949; The Aleph and Other Stories 1933-1969, 1970), El libro de arena (1955; The Book of Sand, 1977), El hacedor (1960; Dreamtigers, 1964), El libro de los seres imaginarios (1967; The Book of Imaginary Beings, 1969), and El informe de Brodie (1970; Dr. Brodie’s Report, 1972). Labyrinths (1962) is a collection of stories and other writings. Borges also wrote philosophical and literary essays such as those in Otras inquisiciones (1952; Other Inquisitions, 1964). In 1998 Collected Fictions provided the first complete translation into English of all Borges’s works of fiction.
García Márquez, Gabriel (1928- ), Colombian novelist and short-story writer, known as one of the masters of magic realism, a style that weaves together realism and fantasy. He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1982.


García Márquez was born in Aracataca. He attended the National University of Colombia but did not graduate. Instead, he became a newspaper editor, working in Cartagena in 1946, in Barranquilla from 1948 to 1952, and in Bogotá in 1952. From 1959 to 1961 he worked for the Cuban news agency La Prensa in Colombia; Havana, Cuba; and New York City. García Márquez was a liberal thinker whose left-wing politics angered conservative Colombian dictator Laureano Gómez and his successor, General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla. To escape persecution, García Márquez spent the 1960s and 1970s in voluntary exile in Mexico and Spain. In the early 1980s he was formally invited back to Colombia, where he mediated between the Colombian government and leftist rebels.


García Márquez's best-known novels include El coronel no tiene quien le escriba (1958; No One Writes to the Colonel, 1968), about a retired soldier; Cien años de soledad (1967; One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1970), the epic story of a Colombian family, which shows the stylistic influence of American novelist William Faulkner; and El otoño del patriarca (1975; The Autumn of the Patriarch, 1976), concerning political power and corruption. Crónica de una muerte anunciada (1981; Chronicle of a Death Foretold, 1983) is the story of murder in a Latin American town. Collected Stories was published in English translation in 1984. El amor en los tiempos del cólera (1985; Love in the Time of Cholera, 1988) tells a story of romantic love. El general en su laberinto (1989; The General in His Labyrinth, 1990) is a fictional account of the last days of South American revolutionary leader and statesman Simón Bolívar. Del amor y otros demonios (1994; Of Love and Other Demons, 1995) concerns a girl who is believed to be possessed by demons. Noticia de un secuestro (1996; News of a Kidnapping, 1997), a nonfiction work, examines the illegal cocaine industry in Colombia.


Lawrence, D(avid) H(erbert) (1885-1930), English novelist and poet, ranked among the most influential and controversial literary figures of the 20th century. In his more than 40 books he celebrated his vision of the natural, whole human being, opposing the artificiality of modern industrial society with its dehumanization of life and love. His novels were misunderstood, however, and attacked and even suppressed because of their frank treatment of sexual matters.


Lawrence was born September 11, 1885, in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, the son of a coal miner. His mother had been a schoolteacher. The disparity in social status between his parents was a recurrent motif in Lawrence's fiction. A graduate (1908) of University College, Nottingham, Lawrence published his first poems in the English Review in 1909 and his first novel, The White Peacock, in 1911. The most significant of his early fiction, Sons and Lovers (1913), which was in large part autobiographical, deals with life in a mining town.


In 1912 Lawrence eloped to the Continent with Frieda Weekley, his former professor's wife (sister of the German aviator Freiherr Manfred von Richthofen), marrying her two years later, after her divorce. Their intense, stormy life together supplied material for much of his writing. The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (1921)—perhaps his best novels—explore with outspoken candor the sexual and psychological relationships of men and women. In this period he also wrote two books of verse, Love Poems and Others (1913) and Look! We Have Come Through (1917).


Lawrence led a harried life in England during World War I because of his wife's German origin and his own opposition to the war. Tuberculosis added to his problems, and in 1919 he began a period of restless wandering to find a more healthful climate. His travels provided the locales of several books: the Abruzzi region of Italy for The Lost Girl (1920), Sardinia for Sea and Sardinia (1921), and Australia for Kangaroo (1923). During stays in Mexico and Taos, New Mexico (1923-25), he wrote The Plumed Serpent (1926), a novel reflecting Lawrence's fascination with Aztec civilization. His most original poetry, published in Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923), flowed from his experience of nature in the southwestern United States and the Mediterranean region.


From 1926 on Lawrence lived chiefly in Italy, where he wrote and rewrote his most notorious novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), which deals with the sexually fulfilling love affair between a member of the nobility and her husband's gamekeeper. An expurgated version was published in 1932. Lawrence's third and most sexually explicit version of this work was not published until 1959 in the U.S. and 1960 in England; it had been suppressed in both countries until the courts upheld its publication.

Lawrence died March 2, 1930, in a sanatorium in Vence, France.

Note: some names mentioned in the lecture I submit in the class but not mentioned in additional information up to here, I listed them as you can see below:

Tolstoy, Leo Nikolayevich (1828-1910), Russian writer and moral philosopher, one of the world’s greatest novelists. His writings profoundly influenced much of 20th-century literature, and his moral teachings helped shape the thinking of several important spiritual and political leaders.


Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy was born into a family of aristocratic landowners at Yasnaya Polyana, the family estate south of Moscow. His early education came from tutors at home, but after the deaths of his parents in the 1830s, he was raised by relatives. He entered Kazan’ University when he was 16 but preferred to educate himself independently, and in 1847 he gave up his studies without finishing his degree. His next 15 years were very unsettled. Tolstoy returned to manage the family estate, with the determination to improve himself intellectually, morally, and physically and to better the lot of his peasant serfs. After less than two years, however, he abandoned rural life for the pleasures of Moscow. In 1851 Tolstoy traveled to the Caucasus, a region then part of southern Russia, where his brother was serving in the army. He enlisted as a volunteer, serving with distinction in the Crimean War (1853-1856).


Tolstoy began his literary career during his army service, and his first work, the semi-autobiographical short novel Detstvo (1852; translated as Childhood, 1886), brought him acclaim. A series of other stories followed, and when he left the army in 1856 he was acknowledged as a rising new talent in literature. Tolstoy was never comfortable in the literary world, however, and in 1859 he returned to Yasnaya Polyana to manage the estate, set up a school for peasant children, and write about his progressive theories of education.


Tolstoy’s Childhood and its successors Otrochestvo (1854; Boyhood, 1886) and Iunost’ (1857; Youth, 1886) focus on the psychological and moral development of the hero from age ten to his late teens. Childhood in particular presents a lyrical and charming picture of the innocence and joys of childhood through the fresh and acute observations of the child, along with the mature reflections of the adult narrator. Experiences in the Crimean War provided the material for his three Sevastopolskie rasskazy (1855-1856; Sebastopol Tales, 1888), which pay tribute to the courage of the common soldier while forcefully condemning war. A short novel, Kazaki (1863; The Cossacks, 1887), grew out of Tolstoy’s service in the Caucasus. The hero of the book, Olenin, decides to escape the artificiality of Moscow society to attempt a more natural life among the Cossacks in a Caucasian village. He finds that he cannot abandon his civilized values, and the Cossacks never accept him.


Huxley, Aldous Leonard (1894-1963), English novelist, essayist, critic, and poet, grandson of Thomas and brother of Julian, born in Godalming, Surrey, and educated at Eton College and the University of Oxford. He worked on various periodicals and published four books of verse before the appearance of his first novel, Crome Yellow (1921). The novels Antic Hay (1923) and Point Counter Point (1928), both of which illustrate the nihilistic temper of the 1920s, and Brave New World (1932), an ironic vision of a future utopia, established Huxley's fame. During the 1920s he lived largely in Italy and France. He immigrated to the United States in 1937. Among his more than 45 books are the volumes of essays Jesting Pilate (1926), Ends and Means (1937), Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (1956), Brave New World Revisited (1958), and Literature and Science (1963). Other novels include Eyeless in Gaza (1936), After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (1939), Ape and Essence (1948), and Island (1962). Huxley also wrote on science, philosophy, and social criticism. Important nonfiction works include The Art of Seeing (1932), The Perennial Philosophy (1946), and The Devils of Loudon (1952). The Doors of Perception (1954) and its sequel Heaven and Hell (1956) deal with Huxley's experiences with hallucinogenic drugs.


Wells, H(erbert) G(eorge) (1866-1946), English author and political philosopher, most famous for his science-fantasy novels with their prophetic depictions of the triumphs of technology as well as the horrors of 20th-century warfare.


Wells was born September 21, 1866, in Bromley, Kent, and educated at the Normal School of Science in London, to which he won a scholarship. He worked as a draper's apprentice, bookkeeper, tutor, and journalist until 1895, when he became a full-time writer. Wells's 10-year relationship with Rebecca West produced a son, Anthony West, in 1914. In the next 50 years he produced more than 80 books. His novel The Time Machine (1895) mingled science, adventure, and political comment. Later works in this genre are The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898), and The Shape of Things to Come (1933); each of these fantasies was made into a motion picture.


Wells also wrote novels devoted to character delineation. Among these are Kipps (1905) and The History of Mr. Polly (1910), which depict members of the lower middle class and their aspirations. Both recall the world of Wells's youth; the first tells the story of a struggling teacher, the second portrays a draper's assistant. Many of Wells's other books can be categorized as thesis novels. Among these are Ann Veronica (1909), promoting women's rights; Tono-Bungay (1909), attacking irresponsible capitalists; and Mr. Britling Sees It Through (1916), depicting the average Englishman's reaction to war. After World War I (1914-1918) Wells wrote an immensely popular historical work, The Outline of History (2 volumes, 1920).


Throughout his long life Wells was deeply concerned with and wrote voluminously about the survival of contemporary society. For a time he was a member of the Fabian Society. He envisioned a utopia in which the vast and frightening material forces available to modern men and women would be rationally controlled for progress and for the equal good of all. His later works were increasingly pessimistic. '42 to '44 (1944) castigated most world leaders of the period; Mind at the End of Its Tether (1945) expressed the author's doubts about the ability of humankind to survive. He also wrote An Experiment in Autobiography (1934). Wells died August 13, 1946, in London.


Bradbury, Ray (Douglas) (1920- ), American writer of science fiction, best known for his novels and collections of short stories. He often blends science fiction with social criticism and writes about the destructive tendency in humans to use technology at the expense of morality. His Fahrenheit 451 (1953) is the portrait of an autocratic society in which the government provides all information to its citizens via television and all books are banned and burned.

Born in Waukegan, Illinois, Bradbury was an imaginative child prone to nightmares and frightening fantasies, which he later drew on for his writing. He began writing at least four hours a day when he was 12 years old. He sold his first story in 1941 and became a full-time writer in 1943. The Martian Chronicles (1950), a novel about people colonizing Mars, is one of his best-known works. Bradbury has also written poetry and scripts for plays and films. Bradbury’s early works include The Illustrated Man (1951), Dandelion Wine (1957), and Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962). His later works include Long After Midnight (1977), Death Is a Lonely Business (1985), and A Graveyard for Lunatics (1990). The short-story collections Quicker Than the Eye (1996) and Driving Blind (1997) move away from science fiction in style and subject matter.


Steinbeck, John Ernst (1902-1968), American writer and Nobel laureate, who described in his work the unremitting struggle of people who depend on the soil for their livelihood.


Born in Salinas, California, Steinbeck was educated at Stanford University. As a youth, he worked as a ranch hand and fruit picker. His first novel, Cup of Gold (1929), romanticizes the life and exploits of the famous 17th-century Welsh pirate Sir Henry Morgan. In The Pastures of Heaven (1932), a group of short stories depicting a community of California farmers, Steinbeck first dealt with the hardworking people and social themes associated with most of his works. His other early books include To a God Unknown (1933), the story of a farmer whose belief in a pagan fertility cult impels him, during a severe drought, to sacrifice his own life; Tortilla Flat (1935), a sympathetic portrayal of Americans of Mexican descent dwelling near Monterey, California; In Dubious Battle (1936), a novel concerned with a strike of migratory fruit pickers; and Of Mice and Men (1937), a tragic story of two itinerant farm laborers yearning for a small farm of their own.


Steinbeck's most widely known work is The Grapes of Wrath (1939; Pulitzer Prize, 1940), the stark account of the Joad family from the impoverished Oklahoma Dust Bowl and their migration to California during the economic depression of the 1930s. The controversial novel, received not only as realistic fiction but as a moving document of social protest, is an American classic.



Steinbeck's other works include The Moon Is Down (1942), Cannery Row (1945), The Wayward Bus (1947), East of Eden (1952), The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), and America and Americans (1966). In 1962 he wrote the popular Travels with Charley, an autobiographical account of a trip across the United States accompanied by a pet poodle. Steinbeck was awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize in literature. His modernization of the Arthurian legends, The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights, was published posthumously in 1976.


A major literary figure since the 1930s, Steinbeck took as his central theme the quiet dignity he saw in the poor and the oppressed. Although his characters are often trapped in an unfair world, they remain sympathetic and heroic, if defeated, human beings.


Mérimée, Prosper (1803-1870), French novelist and historian, best known for his lengthy short stories, which often contain both realistic and fantastic elements. Born in Paris, Mérimée studied law before entering the civil service, eventually becoming inspector general of historical monuments. Later, through his friendship with French empress Eugénie, he became a senator during the rule of French emperor Napoleon III. Throughout Mérimée's writing career he maintained a friendship with French author Stendhal.


Mérimée's first literary work was a play, Cromwell (1822). He followed this with two pieces of writing, hoaxes that he successfully passed off as original works. One was a collection entitled La théâtre de Clara Gazul (The Theater of Clara Gazul, 1825), six plays purported to be written by a Spanish actress and translated by a figure named Joseph L'Estrange. Mérimée also wrote La guzla (1827), a forged collection of supposedly Illyrian folk songs. In 1829 his historical novel La chronique du règne de Charles IX (The Chronicle of the Reign of Charles IX) was published.


Mérimée's stories, for which he is best remembered, show aspects of both classical and romantic writing (see Classic, Classical, Classicism; Romanticism). They are known for their irony, humor, and concise and objective manner. Mateo Falcone (1829) addresses matters of family honor. Le vase étrusque (The Etruscan Vase, 1830), another prominent tale, concerns death brought about by jealousy. La Venus d'Ille (The Venus of Ille, 1837), which verges on the fantastic, features a statue that kills a man. Colomba (1840) is the tale of a Corsican soldier who is persuaded by his sister to participate in a vengeful killing. Carmen (1845), the story of a tragic romance between a Romni (Gypsy woman) and a Spanish military officer, served as the basis for the opera of the same name by French composer Georges Bizet. Many of Mérimée's nonfiction works, in addition to selections of his correspondence, were also published.


Flaubert, Gustave (1821-1880), French writer, known for his novels Madame Bovary (1857; translated 1886) and L’éducation sentimentale (1869; Sentimental Education, 1898). Considered by many to be the father of realistic fiction (see Realism), Flaubert consistently rejected membership in any school, asserting that he “strove only for beauty.” His works influenced the development of the modern novel, most notably in their detailed, objective observation of everyday life and their concern for form.


Born the son of a prosperous doctor in Rouen, Normandy (Normandie), Flaubert spent much of his childhood in an apartment in the hospital where his father was chief surgeon. He was thus exposed daily to suffering and death, and his experiences reinforced a predisposition to pessimism about human existence. Flaubert attended the prestigious Collège Royal in Rouen, where he received a solid education in the literary works of ancient Greece and Rome. As a young man he was a passionate reader of the works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe of Germany, Lord Byron of England, and François Chateaubriand and Victor Hugo of France. All of these writers were associated with romanticism, a movement that championed individualism, emotion, and imagination.


At the age of 14, Flaubert met Madame Elisa Schlésinger, a 26-year-old married woman who dazzled Flaubert and became the great love of his life. Schlésinger profoundly influenced his work. She inspired the character of Emma Bovary in part, was Madame Renaude in an early version of L’éducation sentimentale, and was immortalized as the lovely Madame Arnoux in the final version of L’éducation sentimentale.


In 1840 Flaubert began law studies in Paris. After failing his second-year examinations, he experienced a seizure while traveling by carriage. What Flaubert termed his “nervous disease” and may have been epilepsy changed his life. Thenceforth he lived as the hermit of Croisset, an estate on the Seine River purchased by his father; his mother and his niece joined him there in 1846, after the deaths of his father and sister. A long journey to the Middle East and Greece from 1849 to 1851 and occasional visits to Paris marked his only considerable absences from Croisset until his death.


Flaubert devoted the remainder of his life to literature. In his correspondence with writers Louise Colet, George Sand, and others, he described what he called “the tortures of style” in his creative process. His six major works required an average of five years each to write. His exacting standards led him to write and rewrite sentences many times over, even yelling them to himself in his garden in an effort to hone and polish them. Flaubert’s pessimistic view of human existence led him to believe that there was no place in the world for ideals or perfection, even though human beings could conceive of them. Appropriately, human speech was an imperfect instrument on which imperfect people must “beat out songs for dancing bears when we would like to make the stars weep.” Flaubert believed that writers must discipline themselves to find the exact words to describe perceptions, to eliminate repetitions and awkwardness, and to discover just the right rhythm and sounds to communicate their vision.


Despite Flaubert’s reputation as a realist writer, Salammbô (1862; translated 1886), La tentation de Saint Antoine (1874; The Temptation of Saint Anthony, 1910), and the short story “Hérodias” (1877; translated in Three Stories, 1910) are colorful and exuberant in their action and setting, and are thus to some degree romantic. His two acknowledged masterpieces, however, reflect the great conscious effort that Flaubert exerted to restrain his flights of fantasy and passion.


London, Jack (1876-1916), American writer, whose work combined powerful realism and humanitarian sentiment. He was born John Griffith London in San Francisco. After completing grammar school, London worked at various odd jobs, and in 1897 and 1898 he participated in the Alaska gold rush. Upon his return to the San Francisco area, he began to write about his experiences. A collection of his short stories, The Son of the Wolf, was published in 1900. During his brief but colorful life, London wrote more than 50 books, experienced enormous popular success as an author, worked as a war correspondent, and undertook two stormy marriages.


Many of his stories, including his masterpiece The Call of the Wild (1903), deal with the reversion of a civilized creature to the primitive state. London's style—brutal, vivid, and exciting—made him enormously popular outside the United States; his works were translated into many languages. London's important works include People of the Abyss (1903), about the poor in London; The Sea Wolf (1904), a novel based on the author's experiences on a seal hunting ship; Martin Eden (1909), an autobiographical novel about a writer's life; John Barleycorn (1913), an autobiographical novel about London's struggle against alcoholism; and The Star Rover (1915), a collection of related stories dealing with reincarnation (see Transmigration).


Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan (1859-1930), British physician, novelist, and detective-story writer, creator of the unforgettable master sleuth Sherlock Holmes.


Conan Doyle was born on May 22, 1859, in Edinburgh and educated at Stonyhurst College and the University of Edinburgh. From 1882 to 1890 he practiced medicine in Southsea, England. A Study in Scarlet, the first of 60 stories featuring Sherlock Holmes, appeared in 1887. The characterization of Holmes, his ability of ingenious deductive reasoning, was based on one of the author's own university professors. Equally brilliant creations are those of Holmes's foils: his friend Dr. Watson, the good-natured if bumbling narrator of the stories, and the master criminal Professor Moriarty. Conan Doyle was so immediately successful in his literary career that approximately five years later he abandoned his medical practice to devote his entire time to writing.


Some of the best known of the Holmes stories are The Sign of Four (1890), The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892), The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), and His Last Bow (1917). They made Conan Doyle internationally famous and served to popularize the detective-story genre (see Detective Story; Mystery Story). A Holmes cult arose and still flourishes, notably through clubs of devotees such as the Baker Street Irregulars. Conan Doyle's literary versatility brought him almost equal fame for his historical romances such as Micah Clarke (1888), The White Company (1890), Rodney Stone (1896), and Sir Nigel (1906), and for his play A Story of Waterloo (1894).


Conan Doyle served in the Boer War as a physician, and on his return to England wrote The Great Boer War (1900) and The War in South Africa: Its Causes and Conduct (1902), justifying England's participation. For these works he was knighted in 1902. During World War I he wrote History of the British Campaign in France and Flanders (6 volumes, 1916-20) as a tribute to British bravery. An advocate of spiritualism since the late 1880s, his lectures and writings on the subject increased markedly after the death of his eldest son in the war. His autobiography, Memories and Adventures, was published in 1924. Conan Doyle died in Crowborough, Sussex, England, on July 7, 1930.


Daudet, (Louis Marie) Alphonse (1840-1897), French writer, known for his accounts of his native Provence. Born in Nîmes, in Provence, he went to Paris, where he published a volume of poetry, Les amoureuses (The Lovers, 1858). About 1861 he became a contributor to the newspaper Le Figaro. Daudet is perhaps best known for his naturalistic, gently humorous sketches of Provençal life, Letters from My Mill (1869; trans. 1900), which first appeared in Le Figaro in 1866, and for his tales about Tartarin, an amusing Provençal braggart. The latter include Tartarin de Tarascon (1872), Tartarin sur les Alpes (Tartarin on the Alps, 1885), and Port Tarascon (1890). He also wrote Les contes du lundi (The Monday Tales, 1873), short stories about the Franco-Prussian War. Among his other works are the play L'arlésienne (The Woman from Arles, 1872), for which the French composer Georges Bizet wrote incidental music; the novels Jack (1876), Le nabab (The Nabob, 1877), Les rois en exil (The Kings in Exile, 1879), and Sapho (1884); and the semiautobiographical novel Le petit chose (The Small Matter, 1868). This account of school life is sometimes compared to Charles Dickens's similarly autobiographical novel David Copperfield (1850). Daudet's two volumes of memoirs, Souvenirs d'un homme de lettres (Reminiscences of a Man of Letters) and Trente ans de Paris (Thirty Years in Paris), were published in 1888.


Bierce, Ambrose Gwinett (1842-1914?), American satirist, short-story writer, and journalist, born in Meigs County, Ohio. He served in the Union army during the American Civil War (1861-1865) and as a result of distinguished service went west with a military expedition. He settled in San Francisco and wrote brief, witty political pieces and a column for the News-Letter; by 1868 he had become editor of the paper. He moved to London in 1872 and the caustic sketches and stories he wrote for the magazines Fun and Figaro, under the pen name of Dod Grile, were published as Cobwebs from an Empty Skull (1874).


Bierce returned to San Francisco in 1877, writing for the Argonaut, editing the Wasp, and writing a column for the Sunday Examiner, owned by William Randolph Hearst. Bierce's wit and fascination with death and horror earned him the nickname Bitter Bierce; his mastery of the short story was compared favorably with that of the American writers Edgar Allan Poe and Bret Harte. From 1899 until 1913 he worked for the Hearst interests in Washington, D.C., and revised his own works. In 1913 he went to Mexico and disappeared; he is presumed to have died there. His Collected Works were published in 12 volumes (1909-1912) and include The Devil's Dictionary (1911), first published in 1906 under the title The Cynic's Word Book.


Maugham, W(illiam) Somerset (1874-1965), English author, whose novels and short stories are characterized by great narrative facility, simplicity of style, and a disillusioned and ironic point of view. Maugham was born in Paris and studied medicine at the University of Heidelberg and at Saint Thomas's Hospital, London. His partially autobiographical novel Of Human Bondage (1915) is generally acknowledged as his masterpiece and is one of the best realistic English novels of the early 20th century. The Moon and Sixpence (1919) is a story of the conflict between the artist and conventional society, based on the life of the French painter Paul Gauguin; other novels are The Painted Veil (1925), Cakes and Ale (1930), Christmas Holiday (1939), The Hour Before the Dawn (1942), The Razor's Edge (1944), and Cataline: A Romance (1948). Among the collections of his short stories are The Trembling of a Leaf (1921), which includes “Miss Thompson,” later dramatized as Rain; Ashenden: or The British Agent (1928); First Person Singular (1931); Ah King (1933); and Quartet (1948). He also wrote satiric comedies— The Circle (1921) and Our Betters (1923)—the melodrama East of Suez (1922), essays, and two autobiographies.


O’Flaherty, Liam (1896-1984), Irish novelist, born on Inishmore, one of the Aran Islands of county Galway, and educated at University College, Dublin. He was a leading Irish novelist of the early 20th century. His works are characterized by realism and powerful drama. Among his books are Thy Neighbor's Wife (1924), The Informer (1925; film, 1935), Mr. Gilhooley (1926), Short Stories (1937; revised 1956), Land (1946), Two Lovely Beasts and Other Stories (1950), Insurrection (1951), and The Pedlar's Revenge and Other Stories (1976).


O’Faoláin, Seán (1900-91), Irish fiction writer, essayist, and biographer. Born in Cork, he was educated at the National University of Ireland and at Harvard University. His experiences as an active participant in the Irish nationalist conflict influenced the short-story collection Midsummer Night Madness (1932) and the first of his four novels, A Nest of Simple Folk (1933). Ninety of his short stories, unsparing pictures of life in modern Ireland, written between 1932 and 1976, were published in Collected Stories (1983). His critical writing concerns such matters as censorship by the Irish church and the cultural and social problems faced by the Irish people, past and present. He also published biographies of the Irish statesmen Daniel O'Connell and Eamon de Valera, and in 1949 wrote The Irish, a study of the national temperament. He taught in the United States and England before returning to Ireland in 1933, where he settled as a writer.

Fitzgerald, F(rancis) Scott (Key) (1896-1940), American writer, whose novels and short stories chronicled changing social attitudes during the 1920s, a period dubbed The Jazz Age by the author. He is best known for his novels The Great Gatsby (1925) and Tender Is the Night (1934), both of which depict disillusion with the American dream of self-betterment, wealth, and success through hard work and perseverance.


The son of a well-to-do Minnesota family, Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born in Saint Paul and attended Roman Catholic schools. While at Princeton University, Fitzgerald befriended Edmund Wilson, later an important literary critic, and John Peale Bishop, later a noted poet and novelist. Both men became important lifelong influences on Fitzgerald’s work. In 1917 Fitzgerald left Princeton because of academic difficulties and joined the United States Army, which was then entering World War I. While in basic training near Montgomery, Alabama, he met high-spirited, 18-year-old Zelda Sayre. They married in 1920 and she became the model for many of the female characters in his fiction.


Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), captured a mood of spiritual desolation in the aftermath of World War I and a growing, devil-may-care pursuit of pleasure among the American upper classes. The book met with both commercial and critical success. Thereafter, Fitzgerald regularly contributed short stories to such diverse periodicals as the high-tone Scribner’s Magazine and the mass-market Saturday Evening Post. He wrote about cosmopolitan life in New York City during Prohibition (a ban on the sale of alcoholic drinks from 1920 to 1933) as well as the American Midwest of his childhood. His early short fiction was collected in Flappers and Philosophers (1920) and Tales of the Jazz Age (1922).


Financial success as well as celebrity enabled the Fitzgeralds to become integral figures in the Jazz Age culture that he portrayed in his writing. Fitzgerald’s partly autobiographical second novel, The Beautiful and the Damned (1922), is the story of a wealthy young couple whose lives are destroyed by their extravagant lifestyle. In 1925 Fitzgerald reached the peak of his powers with what many critics think is his finest work, The Great Gatsby. Written in crisp, concise prose and told by Nick Carraway, a satiric yet sympathetic narrator, it is the story of Jay Gatsby, a young American ne’er-do-well from the Midwest. Gatsby becomes a bootlegger (seller of illegal liquor) in order to attain the wealth and lavish way of life he feels are necessary to win the love of Daisy Buchanan, a married, upper-class woman who had once rejected him. The story ends tragically with Gatsby’s destruction. Although the narrator ultimately denounces Daisy and others who confuse the American dream with the pursuit of wealth and power, he sympathizes with those like Gatsby who pursue the dream for a redeeming end such as love.


From 1924 until 1931 the Fitzgeralds made their home on the French Riviera, where they became increasingly enmeshed in a culture of alcohol, drugs, and perpetual parties. Fitzgerald began a battle with alcoholism that went on for the rest of his life, and Zelda experienced a series of mental breakdowns in the early 1930s that eventually led to her institutionalization. Tender Is the Night is generally regarded as Fitzgerald’s dramatization of Zelda’s slide into insanity. It tells of a young doctor who marries one of his psychiatric patients. The novel met with a cool reception.


Poor reviews of Tender Is the Night alienated Fitzgerald from the literary scene and Zelda’s disintegration left him personally distraught. In 1937 he moved to Los Angeles, California, where he worked as a scriptwriter. While there, he began The Last Tycoon, a novel set amid corruption and vulgarity in the Hollywood motion-picture industry. At the age of 44 Fitzgerald died of a heart attack.


An edited version of his unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon, was published in 1941. In 1945 Edmund Wilson edited The Crack-Up, a collection of Fitzgerald’s essays and letters from the 1930s. Other collections of Fitzgerald’s writings include All The Sad Young Men (1926), Afternoon of an Author (1958), The Pat Hobby Stories (1962), and Letters (1963).


Thurber, James Grover (1894-1961), American cartoonist and author, whose writings, which range from gentle whimsy to irony, gained him a place as one of America's greatest 20th-century humorists. Thurber's cartoons, often depicting melancholy-looking animals or oversized wives bedeviling undersized husbands, are also much admired.


Born in Columbus, Ohio, Thurber was educated at Ohio State University. He later worked as a code clerk for the State Department and subsequently went to France, where he worked for the French edition of the Chicago Tribune. He moved to New York City in 1926 and worked as a reporter for the Evening Post. In 1927, Thurber became staff writer and managing editor of The New Yorker; he continued to contribute stories and cartoons long after he left the magazine in 1933. Thurber was the author of many successful books that focus on the frustrations of average men faced with the overwhelming pressures of everyday modern life. Is Sex Necessary? (1929) was written with the American writer E. B. White. It was followed by The Owl in the Attic and Other Perplexities (1931), My Life and Hard Times (1933), The Middle-Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze (1935), Let Your Mind Alone! (1937), and Fables for Our Time (1940). The Male Animal (1940) is a play written with the American actor and playwright Elliott Nugent. Thurber's best-known story, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” (1942), is about an ordinary man who imagines himself as a hero. The Thirteen Clocks (1950) and The Wonderful O (1957) are two popular books for children. The Years with Ross (1959) is an account of Thurber's life on The New Yorker. Failing eyesight caused him to give up cartooning in the last decade of his life.


Saroyan, William (1908-1981), American writer, born in Fresno, California. His early writings frequently deal with his beloved Armenian family and its capacity for joy in the face of adversity. Notable among these works are the collection of short stories My Name Is Aram (1940) and the novel The Human Comedy (1943). Saroyan's many plays, lyrical and loosely constructed, include My Heart's in the Highlands, which was produced to much acclaim in 1939, and The Time of Your Life, for which he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1940. Saroyan refused to accept the award for a work he deemed no more laudable than any of his others.


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