A Brief History of the Short Story in America

The development and rise of the American short story in the 19th century was the
result of simple market forces. Because urban populations in America were so
unstable, workers moving from city to city as new lands and employment
opportunities arose, newspapers found that serializing novels was bad business:
advertisement space was worthless alongside a chapter from a novel that no one
lived in town long enough to read. British novelists like Dickens and Trollope
published their novels first in serial form, and then collected the chapters together to
sell as a book. American novelists had very few venues for serialization, which is why
the shape of the American literary novel differs so radically from its British
counterpart: chapters from serialized novels read like episodes of soap operas—
each chapter opens with a crisis that is soon resolved and closes with the
introduction of a new crisis or cliffhanger which will be resolved at the beginning of
the next installment. Not so with the American novel—think Moby Dick or
Huckleberry Finn.

With no periodical market for the novel in the U.S., writers of fiction in the first half of the
19th century borrowed the form of the short tale from German authors such as Wilhelm
Kleist and E.T.A. Hoffmann and altered the form to suit American newspapers. The
result was the literary form we now know as the short story.

What we now know as a literary form, however, was originally no more high Art than is
pop music today. Short stories were commercial products written for newspapers and
magazines by writers who were trying to make a living at it. Poe tried to elevate the
short story to the condition of Art, and Hawthorne produced a few volumes; there’s
Melville’s Piazza Tales, and the little busybody Washington Irving wrote The
Knickerbocker Tales. For the most part, however, the short story was a mere short
entertainment akin to a sit-com or hour-long drama on the television.

By the time William Dean Howells took over the editorship of The Atlantic Monthly in
1871 the short story form had split into two distinct categories, the same way other art
forms split into that which aspires to the Condition of Art and that which exists only to
make money. The literary short story had become an art form, but it was also an art
form which paid real money. For instance, Jack London once had a contract with
Cosmopolitan to write a story a month for a year at the rate of $1000 per story. I once
did the math on this number, using rents in Oakland, California as the index of the value
of the dollar, and that thousand dollars a hundred years ago is worth about $250,000 in
today’s money, what one would get for selling film rights to Hollywood. When a novelist
at the turn of the 20th century needed cash to support the novel-in-progress, he would
write a short story, and the money would sustain him nicely for a good long while. And
it’s no surprise that the short stories, written for money as they most often were, were
generally not of the same caliber or difficulty as the novels produced by the same
authors. Compare the difficulty level differences between the stories and novels of
Henry James and William Faulkner and this becomes obvious.
The rise of film, however, changed the status and ultimately the function of the short
story permanently. Just as photography negated the mimetic function of the art of
painting, rendering the imitative function of painting obsolete, film’s rise obliterated the
short story’s function of delivering short narratives. This took some time, as not
everyone had a movie theater nearby and open all hours of the day and night, but
today, with movies available with the click of a mouse or remote control, obtaining a
short narrative that not only tells a story but which shows the story as well, the short
story, for the greater public, has become an artifact of the past and curiosity of the
present.

When photography disrupted the mimetic function of painting, artists responded by

making paintings that were decidedly non-mimetic, that used as a premise the notion
that what they were painting was not reality, but an artist’s impression of reality. Monet’s
Cathedral of Notre Dame paintings are not attempts to realistically render the church
any more than Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” is an attempt at astronomical accuracy.

The short story has followed suit. When its narrative function was usurped by film, short
story writers focused increasingly on the other aspects of the art of fiction. Robert
Coover attempts to obliterate narrative certitude, Donald Barthelme operates like a
collagist and pop-culture analyst, John Barth fuses criticism and narrative, the
minimalists favor style over substance, and it’s almost a universal law that whatever
conflict is introduced is not going to be resolved (in rebellion to film, which almost
always resolves conflicts neatly and with divine finality). The short story has responded
to film by attempting to render in fiction that which is unfilmable.

The short story has evolved into a different creature than its forbears. The short story is
no longer a popular narrative medium. Like poetry, the short story has honed itself out
of the public eye and entered the depopulate badlands of Art.

There are very few commercial venues in the country for the short story—Harper’s, The
Atlantic, Playboy, The New Yorker, Esquire and perhaps a few others. Short story
writers publish in literary journals for nominal pay—a few hundred dollars at best—or, as
is usually the case, no pay. The majority of readers of short stories are the short story
writers themselves—mirroring the state of contemporary poetry. Operating beneath the
radar of any culture but their own, short story writers are creating works of Art that bear
little semblance to the works being created by novelists. Uncompensated (except
perhaps with university posts), unread, short story writers, like poets, are free to write
whatever they want to write without fear of low sales, public censure, or even bad book
reviews, since their collections, published primarily on university and small presses,
usually don’t get reviewed in anything other than the journals in which the stories
originally appeared. The books become curiosities for the literary historians of the future
even before they exist in print.

My point, finally, is this: the American Short Story has its own unique history and pattern
of development. This history and development is not the same as that of the American
Novel, which is still a thriving medium and a medium with a wide range of aesthetic
intent. The American Short Story, as a popular form, is extinct. Its descendent, the Short
Story as Art Form, survives, albeit in the literary fringes of the culture.

In America the novel is generally (although not overtly) favored, granted more prestige,
than the short story.

The American Short Story may be fiction, but it is not the same type of fiction as the
American Novel.

Though the Short Story garners less prestige, it is nonetheless as worthy an art form as
the Novel.

The Origins and History of the American Short Story

By Nick Ostdick. Mar 10, 2016. 9:00 AM.

The short story and jazz music have taken quite the similar journey through the cultural
consciousness of American society. Now relegated to niche art forms, both flourished in
the early and mid-parts of the 20th Century, reaching a level of popularity that
transcended age, race, and regionalism. Simply put, everyone listened to jazz and
everyone read short stories, and everyone talked about them as important exports of
American culture.
But whereas jazz developed primarily after the turn of the 20th Century, the emergence
and popularization of the short story had been brewing nearly one hundred years prior.
And while the short story in Europe—particularly in countries like Ireland and the U.K.,
both of which have grand literary traditions—had been going strong for a century or so
and was based heavily on the oral storytelling tradition, origins of the American short
story are more easily definable and pragmatic, based largely on the greater culture of the
average American reader rather than some kind of artistic dictum or manifesto.
As with much of American arts and culture, perhaps unfortunately so, the short story
rose to prominence when Americans needed it most, but was then left unattended and
unnurtured when its relevance seemed more of a question than a certainty.
Influences
Before understanding the context in which the modern American short story was born,
it’s important to understand its influences and the narrative traditions and customs that
helped shape it. The earliest versions of the American short story can be traced back to
Germany where writers such Heinrich von Kleist, E.T.A. Hoffmann, and Ludwig Tieck
were popularizing a hybrid narrative art form that combined the sketch and the tale.
While a sketch was more akin to a piece of performance art—often told in present tense
with little attention to plot in service of exploration of character or voice—a tale was
likened to a campfire story, told in past tense with an emphasis on plot, the voice of the
narrator, and an occasion for the telling of the story. Sketches were often much simpler
and shorter in length, while tales could be quite complicated and lengthy.
Both sketch and tale have roots outside of German literary tradition, but writers like
Kleist, Hoffman, and Tieck took elements from both sketch and plot to create brief
narratives that emphasized both character and plot. These hybrid pieces, which were
compact enough to be completed in one sitting, began to appear in newspapers across
Germany as an easily accessible form of entertainment.
Welcome to America
Like so many of America’s greatest cultural exports, the modern short story grew out of
necessity rather than luxury. At the turn of the 19th Century, the United States was a
burgeoning country with pioneers and adventure-seekers pushing their way west in
search of new opportunity. With so much of the American population constantly on the
move from one town to the next, the serialized novel was not a viable form of literature
as it was across Europe, particularly in England—folks had little interest in picking up a
newspaper or magazine and investing themselves in a chapter of a story, only to leave
the next morning without any hope of seeing the piece through to the end.
As such, early American short stories writers like Washington Irving and Herman
Melville drew from the works of German writers to create self-contained, often
fantastical short narratives readers could easily finish in one sitting and newspapers had
space to print. The result was a national phenomenon that proved very lucrative for both
writers and publishers, allowing writers to publish a few stories per year to help
subsidize their incomes while they worked on longer, novel-length projects—a practice
that continued well into the middle of the 20th Century with magazines like The
Saturday Evening Post, The New Yorker, Playboy, Esquire, and others.
If writers like Irving and Melville got the ball rolling with the modern American short
story, then authors like Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne took up the mantle
and helped create two distinct strains of the short story that persisted well into the
1960s and 1970s. While both writers dabbled in the surreal or absurd, Poe and
Hawthorne’s divergence in aesthetic resulted in a divide between short stories viewed as
art (Poe) and short stories viewed as entertainment (Hawthorne).
It may be a subtle difference, one the reader might not even notice, but this division in
authorial intention had a direct impact on how writers viewed the American short story
and its possibilities for artistic expression—writers who viewed the story more as
entertainment were the predecessors to pulp, adventure, or crime/noir short fiction
writers, while those in the artistic camp were the forbearers to generations of more
avant-garde or experimental authors.
20th Century and Beyond
The concept that writers could make a living by selling a few short stories per year—
whether as art, entertainment, or some combination thereof—existed well into the 1960s
and 1970s. Writers like William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, John Cheever, John
Updike, J.D. Salinger, and others were able to make comfortable livings by selling a
handful of stories per year. With a national audience that craved new short fiction on a
weekly or monthly basis, the short story form was a literary playground for writers
looking to push the form to its limits, be it in aesthetics or content—think writers
like Donald Barthelme and Robert Coover for aesthetics, and Toni Morrison and Joyce
Carol Oates for subject matter.
Literary scholars struggle in some respects for a concrete reason, but the short story
began to fall out of favor in the late 1980s and early 1990s. While just a few years before
the form seemed invigorated by such practitioners as Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff,
Bobbie Ann Mason, and others, the short story was reduced to something of a warm-up
exercise to the novel—like a series of calisthenics before a marathon.
Though the short story has seen something of a resurgence in the last 10 to 15 years with
the proliferation of MFA programs—a 20 page story is a much easier thing to discuss in
a writing workshop compared to a 250 page novel—the short story today is still a
boutique narrative form with very few national publications—aside from The New
Yorker and a few others—regularly featuring them.
But like its musical cousin jazz, the short story has managed to find traction and
readership online, and many internet-based publications have taken a chance on the
form, much in the same way printed newspapers did nearly two centuries ago.
Many literary scholars and readers often declare the short story as something of a dying
form, but perhaps today’s most common vessel for news and entertainment—the
internet—will help the form sustain and evolve in much the same way the internet’s
forefather did all those years ago.