The American Short Story: The Nineteenth Century

Diverse, wide-ranging, and unprecedented in its scope, this new two-volume collection gathers more than 100 stories by 51 writers to track the development of the American short story from Charles Brockden Brown's haunting fragments and Washington Irving's sketches to Poe's gothic tales of horror to Mark Twain's humorous stories to the Gilded Age masterpieces of Henry James and Edith Wharton.
The first volume presents all the genre's essential voices in generous selections. Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville are here, as is Rose Terry Cooke, a leading early voice of American literary regionalism, restored to her rightful place as a major writer with three indelible masterpieces. Rebecca Harding Davis's Life in the Iron-Mills, a gripping work of social realism, appears in a version that restores passages cut from its original magazine publication to blunt the author's scathing critique of Christian indifference to the poverty of industrial workers. Among the many rediscovered gems in this volume are William Austin's Peter Rugg, the Missing Man, an unforgettable story about a cursed wanderer that has passed into New England folklore; two sketches from antebellum Black writer and physician James McCune Smith's Heads of the Colored People series, which lampoon the racist pseudoscience of phrenology; Lucretia P. Hale's feminist fantasy The Queen of the Red Chessman ; Francis Parkman's The Scalp-Hunter, a riveting frontier drama drawn from the author's wilderness travels in New England's far north; and Fitz-James O'Brien's The Lost Room and What Was It?, powerful and highly charged homoerotic tales of decadent horror.

The second volume charts the evolution of the American short story from Bret Harte's mid-century tales of the Gold Rush frontier to Alice Dunbar-Nelson's The Stones of the Village, a story of racial passing written in 1900 but unpublished in the author's lifetime. Edith Wharton, only getting started in the last decade of the century but already a highly accomplished short story writer, is represented by two breakout successes. The form achieves perhaps its fullest nineteenth-century flowering with Henry James, whose greatest masterpieces are showcased here. Here too are the superlative aesthetic accomplishments of the so-called local-color writers of the post Civil War era. These indelible works by Constance Fenimore Woolson, Sarah Orne Jewett, Kate Chopin, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, and others draw attention to regional character, dialect, and setting in exquisitely crafted fiction. Readers will encounter the starkly brilliant short fiction of Stephen Crane, portraying moments of extreme crisis, as well as indispensable works by Black writers Charles W. Chesnutt and Paul Laurence Dunbar, whose electrifying explorations of racial identity make inventive use of African American speech and folklore. Also included are works by the compelling and captivating folklorists George Chandler Harris and Thomas Nelson Page, unreconstructed white southerners whose sentimental pictures of their ancestral home are a striking counterpoint to Chesnutt's and Dunbar's fiction. Among the rediscoveries here are Francis Hopkinson Smith's minor comic masterpiece Six Hours in Squantico, about a train traveler stuck in a backwater town, and Frank R. Stockton's The Lady, or the Tiger? and its delightfully metafictional sequel, The Discourager of Hesitancy.

John Stauffer, editor, is the Sumner R. and Marshall S. Kates Professor of English and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. He is the author or editor of twenty books, including the national best seller Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln.