Classic American Short Stories
Synopsis
Americans have been writing short stories for almost as long as Americans have been writing fiction. A literary form that emerged early in the nineteenth century, the short story came to maturity alongside the novel both art forms in which American writers strove to capture the character of their fledgling country, and distinguish their style of storytelling from the older and different storytelling traditions of the English and Continental cultures they had only recently cut ties to. The short story was not an exclusive creation of American writers, but it developed earlier in the United States than it did abroad, and the objectives of the American writers who refined it sent the form down a slightly dif- ferent evolutionary path. Classic American Short Stories is a celebration of the short story as it was devel- oped and popularized in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The authors represented in this volume were masters of the short-fiction form (even though some were better known as novelists), and their stories represent some of the best American writing of the last two centuries.
