A Short Story

The Beginning• Short story collections as we know them, really

began with Jacob and Wilhelm…..Grimm in the beginning of the 1800’s.

• Stories and fables had been around before then, but these are the closest, earliest representations to what we have today.

• What did The Grimm Brothers’ write?

The Plot Continues

• Nathaniel Hawthorne was one of the first American authors to create a collection of short stories “Tales Twice Told.”

• Washing Irving wrote “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”

• Then, short stories really took off with…

Mr. Poe

• Edgar Allan Poe believed a literary work should be finished in one sitting. A lot of writers gave him flak for this. They thought he was a talentless hack.

• He fused the mystery genre with the short stories to produce terrifying horror stories.

• Then, guys like Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, and Herman Melville started writing stories. Some were serious reflections of American life. Some were satires…

Antebellum

• After the Civil War and into the turn of the century, short stories continued to shift purposes.

• Cheesy romance magazines published women’s literature.

• Political commentary was veiled through short stories

• Authors’ used local color and regionalism to reflect their parts of the nation.

• Authors like Hemingway, Faulkner, and O’Connor

The End

• Some unique traits about short stories:

• Good ones can be unsettling.

• They must economize for impact. Therefore, each work matters. Authors are challenged with making their point quickly.

• “they are snapshots of the human condition and of human nature, and when they work well, and work on us, we are given the rare chance to see in them more ‘than in real life.’—William Boyd

• Short stories “convey the quality of human life, where contact is more like the flash of fireflies, in and out, now here, now there in darkness. Short story writers see by the light of the flash; theirs is the art of the only thing one can be sure of– the present moment.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)

• Nathaniel Hawthorne was an author who revolutionized and helped define American literature.

• He was a descendant of John Hathorne, a judge in the Salem witch trials. His history and life in New England served a subjects for his successful stories about guilt, shame, and purity.

• He went to grade school with the future 14th president, Franklin Pierce, which is important because he later helped him in his campaign.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

• Hawthorne wasn’t popular until he wrote The Scarlet Letter. When he got rejection letters or copies of his books didn’t sell, he would burn them in anger.

• He became close friends with Herman Melville and the two encouraged each other through letters. Hawthorne was Melville’s mentor.

• In order to write his first novel, he secluded himself in a house in Salem, Massachusetts.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

• Legend has it that one of the alleged “witches” in the Salem witch trials put a curse on his family before she was hanged.

• Hawthorne was the first American author to use symbolism and made it an important part of his deeper underlying meaning.

Mr. Poe

• Edgar Allan Poe was born January 19th, 1809. His parents were actors.

• His mother died in 1811 and Poe was taken in by the Allans.

• The Allans didn’t give him enough money for school. He was kicked out of school and went to Boston where he enlisted in the military in 1827, under the name of Edgar A. Perry.

• He was promoted to Sergeant major, discharged and then later received an appointment to West Point.

• By this time, Poe had published two books of poetry.

• He had another quarrel with his adopted father and was again, financially cut off. He then purposefully got himself kicked out of West Point.

• He continued writing and in 1836, he married his young cousin, Virginia Clemm.

• Poe continued working, publishing and editing for magazines.

• Even though he was famous and his stories sold, he was broke due to gambling and drinking.

• When Virginia died in 1847, Poe turned to drinking and having flings/affairs with other women. He was found in a gutter in Baltimore, drunk, taken to a hospital, and died the next day.

Ambrose Bierce

• Born in 1842.

• He was the 10th of 13 kids!

• When the American Civil War broke out, he enlisted in the military.

• In 1865, he was grazed by a bullet, which caused him to suffer dizziness and blackouts the rest of his life.

• In 1868, he met Mark Twain and became an editor under his tutelage.

• He married in 1871 to Mary Ellen Day and had three kids.

• He continued to work as an editor and writer and created what is now known as “The Devil’s Dictionary.”

• He was the Stephen Colbert or Jon Stewart of his time. No one was safe from his satire.

• After two of his children ended, he traveled to Mexico where he mysteriously disappeared. The last anyone ever heard of him was December 26th, 1913.

O. Henry

• O. Henry was born William Sydney Porter (1862-1910).

• He was raised by his paternal grandmother and aunt. He moved to Texas after dropping out of school at age 15. He went to work on a ranch in South Texas.

• In 1887, he married Athol Estes Roach. In 1894, he started writing a comedic article called “The Rolling Stone.”

• When his weekly column failed, he went to write for a newspaper in Houston.

• IN 1984, cash was missing from the First National Bank where O. Henry once worked. When he was suspected and called to trial, he fled the country and went to Honduras.

• When he was in Central America, he got word that his wife was dying so he returned to Austin in 1897.

• In 1897, he was convicted of embezzlement, although there is much debate as to his actual guilt.

• While in prison, he started to write short stories to support his daughter, Margaret.

• When he got out of prison, he changed his name to O. Henry to disassociate himself with his time in jail.

• He moved to NYC and began writing short stories. He was praised for having a humorous, energetic style that critics say is a mix of Mark Twain and Ambrose Bierce.

• He published over 600 short stories.

• His last years were shadowed by alcoholism, ill health and financial problems.

• He was drinking 2 quarts of whiskey a DAY and finally died of cirrhosis of the liver on June 5th, 1910.

Ernest Hemingway

• Lived from 1899-1961

• Born in an affluent suburb of Chicago.

• Spent time with his father, who was a doctor, hunting and fishing.

• His father committed suicide when Ernest was a little boy and this haunted him the rest of his life.

• Hemingway was anxious to help fight in WWI so he got a job as an ambulance driver on the Italian front.

• He was shot in the knee while passing out chocolates to the troops.

• For Hemingway, the effects of violence would form his character subjects. Many of his characters are at war, postwar, around bullfighting, cock fighting, and hunting/fishing.

• His three most well-known works are In Our Time, The Sun Also Rises, and A Farewell to Arms

• Not since Poe has a technique like Hemingway’s dominated a genre.

• If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing, he may omit things he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have an idea of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceburg is due to only 1/8th of it being above water.”

• He lived in Cuba, Florida, and most importantly, Paris.

• He was good friends with the Fitzgeralds. While he was married several times throughout his life, it was rumored he was also in love with Zelda Fitzgerald.

• In 1954, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

• In Idaho, in April of 1961, Hemingway took his own life with his favorite revolver. It was rumored he killed himself, but wasn’t confirmed until several years later when his most recent wife confirmed it. He and his father may have had hemochromatosis, which led to mental degeneration.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

• Gilman was born Charlotte Anna Perkins (1860-1935)

• Her father abandoned her, her mother and her brother when she was a little girl. She grew up around some very progressive aunts.

• She read a lot of progressive domestic feminist writers.

• Grew up in Rhode Island and in 1884 she married Charles Stetson. With him, she had one daughter, Katherine.

• After giving birth, she suffered severe bouts of post-partum depression.

• She divorced her husband, which was practically unheard of back then. She suggested he remarry her best friend. Then she sent her daughter to live with the couple.

• She remarried George Gilman, but the marriage was not a happy one. After he died, she was diagnosed with inoperable breast cancer.

• As an advocate of euthanasia for the terminally ill, she killed herself by inhaling chloroform.

Flannery O’Connor

• (The best one)

• Born 1925 to Edward O’Connor and Regina. She was an only child.

• She was an odd, lonely child who drew cartoons, wrote stories, and loved chickens. As a young girl, she made the paper for teaching a chicken to walk backwards.

• She attended Catholic school and graduated college early.

• At the age of 15, her father died of systemic lupus.

• She went on to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop to study.

• At 26, she was diagnosed with the same disease, lupus, that killed her father. She moved home to Andalusia, her parents’ farm in Milledgevill, Georgia. Although she was diagnosed to only live 5 more years, she lived another 14.

• While on the farm, she wrote her stories and raised peacocks.

• As a Catholic living in the Protestant South, her stories are often about the grotesque, Christian realism, and the Southern Gothic.

Bernard Malamud

• Born in 1917 to Russian Jewish immigrants.

• He worked as a teacher-in-training for 4.50 a day. He was excused from fighting in WWII because he was the sole supporter of his widowed mother.

• He married Ann de Chiara, an Italian-American Roman Catholic. Obviously this match was opposed by both sides of their families.

• Malamud taught at Oregon State University, however, he wasn’t allowed to teach literature because he didn’t have his Ph.D.

• He wrote slowly and carefully, producing only 7 novels and 54 short stories.

• He is most well-known for writing The Natural.

• Flannery O’ Connor said of him: “I have discovered a short story writer who is better than any of them, including myself.”