The American Short Story

Synopsis This entertaining collection--a panoramic survey of American literature--presents over two hundred years of great American Short stories in more than 1,000 pages. From Washington Irving to Joyce Carol Oates, our nation's best writers are showcased at the top of their form. Selections from America's first great quartet of fiction writers--Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allen Poe, and Herman Melville--open this extraordinary volume and reflect the birth of a distinctly American literature. The short story blossomed during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, giving rise to superb works of realism, naturalism, and regionalism. The American Short Story explores these traditions fully, with a wonderful sampling of writings from Ambrose Bierce, Edward Everett Hale, Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Sarah Orne Jewett, Joel Chandler Harris, Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, Henry James, Edith Wharton, and many others. Stories like F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Babylon Revisited" and Ernest Hemingway's "The Snows of the Kilimanjaro" capture the brilliance of "The Lost Generation" writers; the rich tradition of Southern storytelling comes to life in works by William Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, Thomas Wolfe, and Flannery O'Connor; and, in works ranging from the sentimental to the satirical, the hard-hitting to the hilarious, writers like Saul Bellow, James Baldwin, John Updike, and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., illuminate the experiences of America's extraordinarily diverse population. As surprising, diverting, and rich in contradictions and contrasts as the country itself, this collection of stories is a true American treasure and acornerstone for every home library.