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1 results

  • Chapter 4 - The Best of the Best

  • from Part I - Contexts
  • Edited by Michael J. Collins, King's College London, Gavin Jones, Stanford University
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to the American Short Story
    Published online:
    11 May 2023
    Print publication:
    25 May 2023, pp 62-79

  • Summary

    This chapter examines the literary institutions that helped American short fiction to flourish in the twentieth century and maintain its visibility today. These institutions, from the Best American Short Stories and the New Yorker, to the Pushcart Prize and the National Book Award, form a kind of patchwork canon of American short fiction, a record of the writers most celebrated in their moment and most remembered since. Despite the persistent notion, espoused by artists and scholars alike, that the short story is “the art form best suited for the description” of a diverse and “heterogeneous culture,” these institutions also testify to the fact that the genre has, until very recently, underrepresented women and overlooked racialized writers. This chapter documents the writers that these organizations have consecrated, examining how that patchwork canon has often failed to live up to the ideals of cultural pluralism at the heart of the American short story tradition.