Harry Stillwell Edwards (1855– ), a native of Georgia, together with Sarah Barnwell Elliott (? – ) and Will N. Harben (1858–1919) have continued in the vein of that earlier writer, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet (1790–1870), author of Georgia Scenes (1835). Edwards’ best work is to be found in his short stories of black and white life after the manner of Richard Malcolm Johnston. He has written several novels, but he is essentially a writer of human-nature sketches. “He is humorous and picturesque,” says Fred Lewis Pattee, “and often he is for a moment the master of pathos, but he has added nothing new and nothing commandingly distinctive.”[3] An exception to this might be made in favor of Elder Brown’s Backslide (August, 1885, Harper’s), a story in which all the elements are so nicely balanced that the result may well be called a masterpiece of objective humor and pathos. Others of his short stories especially worthy of mention are: Two Runaways (July, 1886, Century), Sister Todhunter’s Heart (July, 1887, Century), “De Valley an’ de Shadder” (January, 1888, Century), An Idyl of “Sinkin’ Mount’in” (October, 1888, Century), The Rival Souls (March, 1889, Century), The Woodhaven Goat (March, 1899, Century), and The Shadow (December, 1906, Century). His chief collections are Two Runaways, and Other Stories (1889) and His Defense, and Other Stories (1898).
The most notable, however, of the group of short story writers of Georgia life is perhaps Richard Malcolm Johnston (1822–1898). He stands between Longstreet and the younger writers of Georgia life. His first book was Georgia Sketches, by an Old Man (1864). The Goose Pond School, a short story, had been written in 1857; it was not published, however, till it appeared in the November and December, 1869, numbers of a Southern magazine, The New Eclectic, over the pseudonym “Philemon Perch.” His famous Dukesborough Tales (1871–1874) was largely a republication of the earlier book. Other noteworthy collections of his are: Mr. Absalom Billingslea and Other Georgia Folk (1888), Mr. Fortner’s Marital Claims, and Other Stories (1892), and Old Times in Middle Georgia (1897). Among individual stories stand out: The Organ-Grinder (July, 1870, New Eclectic), Mr. Neelus Peeler’s Conditions (June, 1879, Scribner’s Monthly), The Brief Embarrassment of Mr. Iverson Blount (September, 1884, Century); The Hotel Experience of Mr. Pink Fluker (June, 1886, Century), republished in the present collection; The Wimpy Adoptions (February, 1887, Century), The Experiments of Miss Sally Cash (September, 1888, Century), and Our Witch (March, 1897, Century). Johnston must be ranked almost with Bret Harte as a pioneer in “local color” work, although his work had little recognition until his Dukesborough Tales were republished by Harper & Brothers in 1883.
Bret Harte (1839–1902) is mentioned here owing to the late date of his story included in this volume, Colonel Starbottle for the Plaintiff (March, 1901, Harper’s), although his work as a whole of course belongs to an earlier period of our literature. It is now well-thumbed literary history that The Luck of Roaring Camp (August, 1868, Overland) and The Outcasts of Poker Flat (January, 1869, Overland) brought him a popularity that, in its suddenness and extent, had no precedent in American literature save in the case of Mrs. Stowe and Uncle Tom’s Cabin. According to Harte’s own statement, made in the retrospect of later years, he set out deliberately to add a new province to American literature. Although his work has been belittled because he has chosen exceptional and theatric happenings, yet his real strength came from his contact with Western life.
Irving and Dickens and other models served only to teach him his art. “Finally,” says Prof. Pattee, “Harte was the parent of the modern form of the short story. It was he who started Kipling and Cable and Thomas Nelson Page. Few indeed have surpassed him in the mechanics of this most difficult of arts. According to his own belief, the form is an American product ... Harte has described the genesis of his own art. It sprang from the Western humor and was developed by the circumstances that surrounded him. Many of his short stories are models. They contain not a superfluous word, they handle a single incident with grapic power, they close without moral or comment. The form came as a natural evolution from his limitations and powers. With him the story must of necessity be brief.... Bret Harte was the artist of impulse, the painter of single burning moments, the flashlight photographer who caught in lurid detail one dramatic episode in the life of a man or a community and left the rest in darkness.”[4]
Harte’s humor is mostly “Western humor” There is not always uproarious merriment, but there is a constant background of humor. I know of no more amusing scene in American literature than that in the courtroom when the Colonel gives his version of the deacon’s method of signaling to the widow in Harte’s story included in the present volume, Colonel Starbottle for the Plaintiff. Here is part of it:
True to the instructions she had received from him, her lips part in the musical utterance (the Colonel lowered his voice in a faint falsetto, presumably in fond imitation of his fair client) “Kerree!” Instantly the night becomes resonant with the impassioned reply (the Colonel here lifted his voice in stentorian tones), “Kerrow!” Again, as he passes, rises the soft “Kerree!”; again, as his form is lost in the distance, comes back the deep “Kerrow!”
While Harte’s stories all have in them a certain element or background of humor, yet perhaps the majority of them are chiefly romantic or dramatic even more than they are humorous.
Among the best of his short stories may be mentioned: The Luck of Roaring Camp (August, 1868, Overland), The Outcasts of Poker Flat (January, 1869, Overland), Tennessee’s Partner (October, 1869, Overland), Brown of Calaveras (March, 1870, Overland), Flip: a California Romance (in Flip, and Other Stories, 1882), Left Out on Lone Star Mountain (January, 1884, Longman’s), An Ingenue of the Sierras (July, 1894, McClure’s), The Bell-Ringer of Angel’s (in The Bell-Ringer of Angel’s, and Other Stories, 1894), Chu Chu (in The Bell-Ringer of Angel’s, and Other Stories, 1894), The Man and the Mountain (in The Ancestors of Peter Atherly, and Other Tales, 1897), Salomy Jane’s Kiss (in Stories in Light and Shadow, 1898), The Youngest Miss Piper (February, 1900, Leslie’s Monthly), Colonel Starbottle for the Plaintiff (March, 1901, Harper’s), A Mercury of the Foothills (July, 1901, Cosmopolitan), Lanty Foster’s Mistake (December, 1901, New England), An Ali Baba of the Sierras (January 4, 1902, Saturday Evening Post), and Dick Boyle’s Business Card (in Trent’s Trust, and Other Stories, 1903). Among his notable collections of stories are: The Luck of Roaring Camp, and Other Sketches (1870), Flip, and Other Stories (1882), On the Frontier (1884), Colonel Starbottle’s Client, and Some Other People (1892), A Protégé of Jack Hamlin’s, and Other Stories (1894), The Bell-Ringer of Angel’s, and Other Stories (1894), The Ancestors of Peter Atherly, and Other Tales (1897), Openings in the Old Trail (1902), and Trent’s Trust, and Other Stories (1903). The titles and makeup of several of his collections were changed when they came to be arranged in the complete edition of his works.[5]
Henry Cuyler Bunner (1855–1896) is one of the humorous geniuses of American literature. He is equally at home in clever verse or the brief short story. Prof. Fred Lewis Pattee has summed up his achievement as follows: “Another [than Stockton] who did much to advance the short story toward the mechanical perfection it had attained to at the close of the century was Henry Cuyler Bunner, editor of Puck and creator of some of the most exquisite vers de société of the period. The title of one of his collections, Made in France: French Tales Retold with a U.S. Twist (1893), forms an introduction to his fiction. Not that he was an imitator; few have been more original or have put more of their own personality into their work. His genius was Gallic. Like Aldrich, he approached the short story from the fastidious standpoint of the lyric poet. With him, as with Aldrich, art was a matter of exquisite touches, of infinite compression, of almost imperceptible shadings. The lurid splashes and the heavy emphasis of the local colorists offended his sensitive taste: he would work with suggestion, with microscopic focussings, and always with dignity and elegance. He was more American than Henry James, more even than Aldrich. He chose always distinctively American subjects—New York City was his favorite theme—and his work had more depth of soul than Stockton’s or Aldrich’s. The story may be trivial, a mere expanded anecdote, yet it is sure to be so vitally treated that, like Maupassant’s work, it grips and remains, and, what is more, it lifts and chastens or explains. It may be said with assurance that Short Sixes marks one of the high places which have been attained by the American short story.”[6]
Among Bunner’s best stories are: Love in Old Cloathes (September, 1883, Century), A Successful Failure (July, 1887, Puck), The Love-Letters of Smith (July 23, 1890, Puck) The Nice People (July 30, 1890, Puck), The Nine Cent-Girls (August 13, 1890, Puck), The Two Churches of ’Quawket (August 27, 1890, Puck), A Round-Up (September 10, 1890, Puck), A Sisterly Scheme (September 24, 1890, Puck), Our Aromatic Uncle (August, 1895, Scribner’s), The Time-Table Test (in The Suburban Sage, 1896). He collaborated with Prof. Brander Matthews in several stories, notably in The Documents in the Case (Sept., 1879, Scribner’s Monthly). His best collections are: Short Sixes: Stories to be Read While the Candle Burns (1891), More Short Sixes (1894), and Love in Old Cloathes, and Other Stories (1896).