Edited by Paul Negri.
Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 2002.
Book Information: Publisher; Google Books; Amazon.com.
Book Series: Dover Thrift Editions.
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Wikipedia Articles :
- American literature: 19th century – Unique American style.
- American literature: Late 19th century Realist fiction.
- American literature: 20th century prose.
Contents of Great American Short Stories :
- Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864), "Young Goodman Brown", 1835.
- Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849), "The Tell-Tale Heart", 1843.
- Herman Melville (1819–1891), "Bartleby, the Scrivener", 1853, 1856.
- Bret Harte (1836–1902), "The Luck of Roaring Camp", 1868 (or 1870).
- Stephen Crane (1871–1900), "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky", 1898.
- Mark Twain (1835–1910), "The Private History of a Campaign That Failed", 1885.
- Sarah Orne Jewett (1849–1909), "A White Heron", 1886.
- Charles W. Chesnutt (1858–1932), "The Goophered Grapevine", 1887.
- Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (1852–1930), "A New England Nun", 1891.
- Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935), "The Yellow Wallpaper", 1892.
- Henry James (1843–1916), "The Real Thing", 1893.
- Kate Chopin (1851–1904), "A Pair of Silk Stockings", 1897.
- Jack London (1876–1916), "To Build a Fire", 1902, 1908.
- Ambrose Bierce (1842–c.1914), "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge", 1890 (or 1909).
- Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945), "The Last Phoebe", 1916.
- Willa Cather (1873–1947), "Paul's Case", 1905 (or 1920).
- F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940), "Bernice Bobs Her Hair", 1920.
- Sherwood Anderson (1876–1941), "The Egg", 1921.
- Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), "The Killers", 1927.
- In some cases Wikipedia or another source gives a date for a story that differs from that given in the Contents to Great American Short Stories; I put the Contents's date in parenthesis above when it was not obviously wrong.
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I previously read only four or five of these nineteen stories (those by Hawthorne, Poe, Harte, Bierce?, Hemingway?), very long ago during school days, so they all came to me as new.
Why are so many of these stories about people in despair?
Several characters discover or imagine layers of reality that are new to them and which they find difficult reconciling with their previous experience and understanding.
Some characters discover or imagine that a close associate conspires against them.
- A married man spends the night in the woods. Was he intending of his own volition to pledge his soul to the devil? In the woods he discovers that nearly everyone of his acquaintance already worships the devil despite their ordinary appearance of faithfulness, goodness, sociability, and good neighborliness. Or perhaps this was all just a dream. In the morning he returns home and spends the rest of his life distrustful and bitter.
- A young man kills an old man because he fears the look of the old man's eye.
- A peculiar young man starves to death because ... he would "prefer not to" ... live?
- An infant is born in a mining camp, his mother dying in childbirth. With no women in the camp the miners undertake raising the infant. The infant and his immediate caretakers die in a flood.
- The sheriff of a village on the Texas border with Mexico comes home with his new wife and faces off with the local bully.
- A group of young men impulsively form a company of soldiers at the beginning of the Civil War. After wandering around ineffectively in their county and a neighboring one the narrator quits after getting a hint of the dangers of war.
- A young girl refuses to reveal the location of a white heron's nest despite being offered a significant sum of money by a hunter.
- A man and his wife listen to an ex-slave's story about a vineyard / plantation from before the Civil War.
- A woman decides not to marry.
- A woman, feeling trapped in her marriage, has psychotic hallucinations.
- A commercial illustrator describes an elegant couple who formerly lived among the upper class but have now become penniless and seek employment as artist's models.
- A poor woman burdened by the responsibility of raising several children suddenly has some cash which she spends on having a good time for herself.
- A man new to the Yukon Territory sets out to walk from a village to a distant camp on an unusually cold day and freezes to death.
Technical objection: The story never mentions show shoes which would have been used in this context, but then there would be no story. - A man is hanged.
- An old man looks for his dead wife and in his quest eventually falls off a cliff to his death.
- A young man whose imagination is only stimulated by music and the backstage whirl of the theater (people constructing a world different from the "real" world) finds the ordinary world of studying, learning, working, making a living, and raising a family beneath his dignity. He steals money from his employer, lives high for a week in the big city, and commits suicide.
- A young woman seeks popularity at the country-club dance. Her jealous cousin tricks her into getting her hair cut.
- A man recalls his childhood blighted by the feeble business endeavors of his desperate parents.
- Two men threaten to kill an ex-prizefighter.
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