After Poe and Hawthorne almost the first author in America to make a vertiginous impression by his short stories was Bret Harte. The wide and sudden popularity he attained by the publication of his two short stories, The Luck of Roaring Camp (1868) and The Outcasts of Poker Flat (1869), has already been noted.[7] But one story just before Harte that astonished the fiction audience with its power and art was Harriet Prescott Spofford’s (1835– ) The Amber Gods (January and February, 1860, Atlantic), with its startling ending, “I must have died at ten minutes past one.” After Harte the next story to make a great sensation was Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s Marjorie Daw (April, 1873, Atlantic), a story with a surprise at the end, as had been his A Struggle for Life (July, 1867, Atlantic), although it was only Marjorie Daw that attracted much attention at the time. Then came George Washington Cable’s (1844– ) “Posson Jone’,” (April 1, 1876, Appleton’s Journal) and a little later Charles Egbert Craddock’s (1850– ) The Dancin’ Party at Harrison’s Cove (May, 1878, Atlantic) and The Star in the Valley (November, 1878, Atlantic). But the work of Cable and Craddock, though of sterling worth, won its way gradually. Even Edward Everett Hale’s (1822–1909) My Double; and How He Undid Me (September, 1859, Atlantic) and The Man Without a Country (December, 1863, Atlantic) had fallen comparatively still-born. The truly astounding short story successes, after Poe and Hawthorne, then, were Spofford, Bret Harte and Aldrich. Next came Frank Richard Stockton (1834–1902). “The interest created by the appearance of Marjorie Daw,” says Prof. Pattee, “was mild compared with that accorded to Frank R. Stockton’s The Lady or the Tiger? (1884). Stockton had not the technique of Aldrich nor his naturalness and ease. Certainly he had not his atmosphere of the beau monde and his grace of style, but in whimsicality and unexpectedness and in that subtle art that makes the obviously impossible seem perfectly plausible and commonplace he surpassed not only him but Edward Everett Hale and all others. After Stockton and The Lady or the Tiger? it was realized even by the uncritical that short story writing had become a subtle art and that the master of its subtleties had his reader at his mercy.”[8] The publication of Stockton’s short stories covers a period of over forty years, from Mahala’s Drive (November, 1868, Lippincott’s) to The Trouble She Caused When She Kissed (December, 1911, Ladies’ Home Journal), published nine years after his death. Among the more notable of his stories may be mentioned: The Transferred Ghost (May, 1882, Century), The Lady or the Tiger? (November, 1882, Century), The Reversible Landscape (July, 1884, Century), The Remarkable Wreck of the “Thomas Hyke” (August, 1884, Century), “His Wife’s Deceased Sister” (January, 1884, Century), A Tale of Negative Gravity (December, 1884, Century), The Christmas Wreck (in The Christmas Wreck, and Other Stories, 1886), Amos Kilbright (in Amos Kilbright, His Adscititious Experiences, with Other Stories, 1888), Asaph (May, 1892, Cosmopolitan), My Terminal Moraine (April 26, 1892, Collier’s Once a Week Library), The Magic Egg (June, 1894, Century), The Buller-Podington Compact (August, 1897, Scribner’s), and The Widow’s Cruise (in A Story-Teller’s Pack, 1897). Most of his best work was gathered into the collections: The Lady or the Tiger?, and Other Stories (1884), The Bee-Man of Orn, and Other Fanciful Tales (1887), Amos Kilbright, His Adscititious Experiences, with Other Stories (1888), The Clocks of Rondaine, and Other Stories (1892), A Chosen Few (1895), A Story-Teller’s Pack (1897), and The Queen’s Museum, and Other Fanciful Tales (1906).
After Stockton and Bunner come O. Henry (1862–1910) and Jack London (1876–1916), apostles of the burly and vigorous in fiction. Beside or above them stand Henry James (1843–1916)—although he belongs to an earlier period as well—Edith Wharton (1862– ), Alice Brown (1857– ), Margaret Wade Deland (1857– ), and Katharine Fullerton Gerould (1879– ), practitioners in all that O. Henry and London are not, of the finer fields, the more subtle nuances of modern life. With O. Henry and London, though perhaps less noteworthy, are to be grouped George Randolph Chester (1869– ) and Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb (1876– ). Then, standing rather each by himself, are Melville Davisson Post (1871– ), a master of psychological mystery stories, and Wilbur Daniel Steele (1886– ), whose work it is hard to classify. These ten names represent much that is best in American short story production since the beginning of the twentieth century (1900). Not all are notable for humor; but inasmuch as any consideration of the American humorous short story cannot be wholly dissociated from a consideration of the American short story in general, it has seemed not amiss to mention these authors here. Although Sarah Orne Jewett (1849–1909) lived on into the twentieth century and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (1862– ) is still with us, the best and most typical work of these two writers belongs in the last two decades of the previous century. To an earlier period also belong Charles Egbert Craddock (1850– ), George Washington Cable (1844– ), Thomas Nelson Page (1853– ), Constance Fenimore Woolson (1848–1894), Harriet Prescott Spofford (1835– ), Hamlin Garland (1860– ), Ambrose Bierce (1842–?), Rose Terry Cooke (1827–1892), and Kate Chopin (1851–1904).
“O. Henry” was the pen name adopted by William Sydney Porter. He began his short story career by contributing Whistling Dick’s Christmas Stocking to McClure’s Magazine in 1899. He followed it with many stories dealing with Western and South- and Central-American life, and later came most of his stories of the life of New York City, in which field lies most of his best work. He contributed more stories to the New York World than to any other one publication—as if the stories of the author who later came to be hailed as “the American Maupassant” were not good enough for the “leading” magazines but fit only for the sensation-loving public of the Sunday papers! His first published story that showed distinct strength was perhaps A Blackjack Bargainer (August, 1901, Munsey’s). He followed this with such masterly stories as: The Duplicity of Hargraves (February, 1902, Junior Munsey), The Marionettes (April, 1902, Black Cat), A Retrieved Reformation (April, 1903, Cosmopolitan), The Guardian of the Accolade (May, 1903, Cosmopolitan), The Enchanted Kiss (February, 1904, Metropolitan), The Furnished Room (August 14, 1904, New York World), An Unfinished Story (August, 1905, McClure’s), The Count and the Wedding Guest (October 8, 1905, New York World), The Gift of the Magi (December 10, 1905, New York World), The Trimmed Lamp (August, 1906, McClure’s), Phoebe (November, 1907, Everybody’s), The Hiding of Black Bill (October, 1908, Everybody’s), No Story (June, 1909, Metropolitan), A Municipal Report (November, 1909, Hampton’s), A Service of Love (in The Four Million, 1909), The Pendulum (in The Trimmed Lamp, 1910), Brickdust Row (in The Trimmed Lamp, 1910), and The Assessor of Success (in The Trimmed Lamp, 1910). Among O. Henry’s best volumes of short stories are: The Four Million (1909), Options (1909), Roads of Destiny (1909), The Trimmed Lamp (1910), Strictly Business: More Stories of the Four Million (1910), Whirligigs (1910), and Sixes and Sevens (1911).
“Nowhere is there anything just like them. In his best work—and his tales of the great metropolis are his best—he is unique. The soul of his art is unexpectedness. Humor at every turn there is, and sentiment and philosophy and surprise. One never may be sure of himself. The end is always a sensation. No foresight may predict it, and the sensation always is genuine. Whatever else O. Henry was, he was an artist, a master of plot and diction, a genuine humorist, and a philosopher. His weakness lay in the very nature of his art. He was an entertainer bent only on amusing and surprising his reader. Everywhere brilliancy, but too often it is joined to cheapness; art, yet art merging swiftly into caricature. Like Harte, he cannot be trusted. Both writers on the whole may be said to have lowered the standards of American literature, since both worked in the surface of life with theatric intent and always without moral background, O. Henry moves, but he never lifts. All is fortissimo; he slaps the reader on the back and laughs loudly as if he were in a bar-room. His characters, with few exceptions, are extremes, caricatures. Even his shop girls, in the limning of whom he did his best work, are not really individuals; rather are they types, symbols. His work was literary vaudeville, brilliant, highly amusing, and yet vaudeville.”[9] The Duplicity of Hargraves, the story by O. Henry given in this volume, is free from most of his defects. It has a blend of humor and pathos that puts it on a plane of universal appeal.
George Randolph Chester (1869– ) gained distinction by creating the genial modern business man of American literature who is not content to “get rich quick” through the ordinary channels. Need I say that I refer to that amazing compound of likeableness and sharp practices, Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford? The story of his included in this volume, Bargain Day at Tutt House (June, 1905, McClure’s), was nearly his first story; only two others, which came out in The Saturday Evening Post in 1903 and 1904, preceded it. Its breathless dramatic action is well balanced by humor. Other stories of his deserving of special mention are: A Corner in Farmers (February, 29, 1908, Saturday Evening Post), A Fortune in Smoke (March 14, 1908, Saturday Evening Post), Easy Money (November 14, 1908, Saturday Evening Post), The Triple Cross (December 5, 1908, Saturday Evening Post), Spoiling the Egyptians (December 26, 1908, Saturday Evening Post), Whipsawed! (January 16, 1909, Saturday Evening Post), The Bubble Bank (January 30 and February 6, 1909, Saturday Evening Post), Straight Business (February 27, 1909, Saturday Evening Post), Sam Turner: a Business Man’s Love Story (March 26, April 2 and 9, 1910, Saturday Evening Post), Fundamental Justice (July 25, 1914, Saturday Evening Post), A Scropper Patcher (October, 1916, Everybody’s), and Jolly Bachelors (February, 1918, Cosmopolitan). His best collections are: Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford (1908), Young Wallingford (1910), Wallingford in His Prime (1913), and Wallingford and Blackie Daw (1913). It is often difficult to find in his books short stories that one may be looking for, for the reason that the titles of the individual stories have been removed in order to make the books look like novels subdivided into chapters.
Grace MacGowan Cooke (1863– ) is a writer all of whose work has interest and perdurable stuff in it, but few are the authors whose achievements in the American short story stand out as a whole. In A Call (August, 1906, Harper’s) she surpasses herself and is not perhaps herself surpassed by any of the humorous short stories that have come to the fore so far in America in the twentieth century. The story is no less delightful in its fidelity to fact and understanding of young human nature than in its relish of humor. Some of her stories deserving of special mention are: The Capture of Andy Proudfoot (June, 1904, Harper’s), In the Strength of the Hills (December, 1905, Metropolitan), The Machinations of Ocoee Gallantine (April, 1906, Century), A Call (August, 1906, Harper’s), Scott Bohannon’s Bond (May 4, 1907, Collier’s), and A Clean Shave (November, 1912, Century). Her best short stories do not seem to have been collected in volumes as yet, although she has had several notable long works of fiction published, such as The Power and the Glory (1910), and several good juveniles.
William James Lampton (?–1917), who was known to many of his admirers as Will Lampton or as W.J.L. merely, was one of the most unique and interesting characters of literary and Bohemian New York from about 1895 to his death in 1917. I remember walking up Fifth Avenue with him one Sunday afternoon just after he had shown me a letter from the man who was then Comptroller of the Currency. The letter was signed so illegibly that my companion was in doubts as to the sender, so he suggested that we stop at a well-known hotel at the corner of 59th Street, and ask the manager who the Comptroller of the Currency then was, so that he might know whom the letter was from. He said that the manager of a big hotel like that, where many prominent people stayed, would be sure to know. When this problem had been solved to our satisfaction, John Skelton Williams proving to be the man, Lampton said, “Now you’ve told me who he is, I’ll show you who I am.” So he asked for a copy of The American Magazine at a newsstand in the hotel corridor, opened it, and showed the manager a full-page picture of himself clad in a costume suggestive of the time of Christopher Columbus, with high ruffs around his neck, that happened to appear in the magazine the current month. I mention this incident to illustrate the lack of conventionality and whimsical originality of the man, that stood out no less forcibly in his writings than in his daily life. He had little use for “doing the usual thing in the usual sort of way.” He first gained prominence by his book of verse, Yawps (1900). His poems were free from convention in technique as well as in spirit, although their chief innovation was simply that as a rule there was no regular number of syllables in a line; he let the lines be any length they wanted to be, to fit the sense or the length of what he had to say. He once said to me that if anything of his was remembered he thought it would be his poem, Lo, the Summer Girl. His muse often took the direction of satire, but it was always good-natured even when it hit the hardest. He had in his makeup much of the detached philosopher, like Cervantes and Mark Twain.
There was something cosmic about his attitude to life, and this showed in much that he did. He was the only American writer of humorous verse of his day whom I always cared to read, or whose lines I could remember more than a few weeks. This was perhaps because his work was never merely humorous, but always had a big sweep of background to it, like the ruggedness of the Kentucky mountains from which he came. It was Colonel George Harvey, then editor of Harper’s Weekly, who had started the boom to make Woodrow Wilson President. Wilson afterwards, at least seemingly, repudiated his sponsor, probably because of Harvey’s identification with various moneyed interests. Lampton’s poem on the subject, with its refrain, “Never again, said Colonel George,” I remember as one of the most notable of his poems on current topics. But what always seemed to me the best of his poems dealing with matters of the hour was one that I suggested he write, which dealt with gift-giving to the public, at about the time that Andrew Carnegie was making a big stir with his gifts for libraries, beginning:
Dunno, perhaps
One of the yaps