Introduction

Summary

The American short story is experiencing a renaissance. “In the last 15 to 20 years,” Gary Fisketjon of Knopf Publishing has observed, “some world-class writers have been working in the short story form.” Many major publishers have increased their support of short story collections to the point where young writers are no longer automatically encouraged to write novels instead. Meanwhile, American universities now offer 250 undergraduate and graduate creative writing programs specializing in short story and poetry composition, and university-sponsored literary magazines have more than justified Eugene Current-Garcia's claim that “short-story publication appears to have become one of the missions of American higher education.” The graduate writing programs have produced an ever-increasing circle of competent and even gifted authors. Just as important, they have been creating a base of short story teachers and readers. During this recent period (1983–8), the sales of the yearly Best American Short Stories anthology increased from 26,000 to 52,000; the O. Henry collection, the second best-selling yearly anthology, doubled its annual sales rate in 1988 alone.

These recent developments are particularly resonant to any individual familiar with the history of the short story in America. Although it is difficult to support the canonical claim that the genre is a distinctly American art form, it is far easier to document that the conscious birth of the short story as a literary genre was an American product of the mid- and late-nineteenth Century. In various contexts, the short story has been derided or celebrated as a major (and distinctly American) transformation of the traditional forms of literary expression – a verkable City-On-A-Hill of a genre.