No two of these are the least alike. If I had named one of O. Henry’s, like “The gift of the Magi,” that would still be different. O. Henry is the shortest of short-story writers. From the slow discursive sketch of Irving to the crisp brief incident, with the unexpected turn at the end, as invented by “O. Henry” (William Sydney Porter was his human name), runs the short story, and represents the most highly developed, most artistic of literary prose forms. These that I have named and many more can be had in the single volume
Representative American Short Stories
Edited by Alexander Jessup
May I put in here a strong word for the essay and suggest that one of our dozen books be a volume of
Emerson’s Essays
Here are ten good reasons for my selection: (1) Their sheer beauty of style; (2) their high moral quality; (3) their eloquent majesty of thought; (4) their pithy rememberable sayings; (5) their richness of suggestion; (6) their stimulus to higher thought and purer feelings; (7) their doctrine of individualism; (8) their appeal for simple living; (9) their universality; (10) their elemental themes.
You will not find them dry or hard or lacking in direct appeal. They will challenge you. They will blow through your thinking as a pure cold current of mountain air blows through the fevered atmosphere of a sick room. The essay, among all our literary forms, with the exception of the letter, is the most direct, most personal, best adapted for information and persuasion. Nor is it, when handled by a master, less satisfying artistically than story or poetry.
We have had the novel of adventure in Cooper, purely romantic as against the realistic. In this same realm, but dealing with utterly different material, is
The Scarlet Letter
By Hawthorne