Short Story: a formidable genre

The reputation of the  short story as a serious and formidable genre was firmly established after Allan Poe published review of Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales in Graham’s Magazine (1842), but it should be added that the tradition of short story  dates from ancient times. The popularity of the short story can be judged by the fact that a great number of renowned authors from several countries like Chekhov, E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, W. Somerset Maugham, H. E. Bates, James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, L. P. Hartley, Sherwood Anderson, Kafka, Dorothy Parker, Hemingway and several others chose this genre of literature to express the truth and reality with extraordinary success. Who can forget “the Ann Beatie and Raymond Carver-led short story renaissance of the 1980s” (Dennis Loy Johnson)? The importance of the short story was very well understood even in 1741 when earliest American magazines like Benjamin Franklin’s General Magazine, and Historical Chronicle published shorter fiction. One may remember that “The Story of the Captain’s Wife and an Aged woman” was published as early as 1789 in Gentleman and Lady’s Town and Country Magazine. Washington Irving’s The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. appeared in the United States in 1815, and his Tales of a Traveller appeared in England (1824).

The early 19th century saw full blossoming of  short fiction with the arrival of Hawthorne and Poe on the literary horizon. Though both these renowned authors made their appearance in several magazines, it was in 1837 that Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales was published in Boston, and Poe’s The Prose romances of Poe in 1843. The short story attained its full growth with the publication of Melville’s The Piazza Tales in 1856, Bret Harte’s collection of short stories (1873), Henry James’ The Real Thing and Other Tales (1893), and Stephen Crane’s The Open Boat, and Other Tales of Adventure (1898).