The American Short Story

Sobre el libro The American Short Story de John Stauffer publicado por PENGUIN USA al 2025:

The first volume in a landmark story collection that redefines what we thought we knew about the great American literary formA diverse, unprecedented gathering of more than one hundred stories, representing work by fifty different writersAs much a nineteenth-century American invention as the cotton gin and the steamboat, the short story emerged here with a range of innovation and a variety of styles and subjects that has still not been fully appreciated. Diverse, wide-ranging, and unprecedented in its scope, The American Short Story: The Nineteenth Century gathers more than one hundred stories by fifty different writers. This first volume of Library of Americas two-volume collection of nineteenth-century American short fiction tracks the development of the American short story from Charles Brockden Browns fragments and Washington Irvings sketches to Poes gothic tales of horror to Mark Twains humorous stories. Represented here by generous selections are all the major figuresIrving, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and Twainas well as Rose Terry Cooke, also a major writer, restored to a place of prominence in this anthology with three unforgettable masterpieces. Among the many unexpected writers in this volume are: William Austin, so crucial to the development of Hawthorne and Poe the antebellum Black writer and physician James McCune Smith, whose sketches in his Heads of the Colored People series lampooned the pseudoscientific racism of phrenology Lucretia Hale, the author of the feminist fantasy The Queen of the Red Chessman, perhaps the greatest one-hit wonder of the mid-nineteenth century Francis Parkman, whose early magazine fiction remains unknown today even to many scholars and Fitz-James OBrien, the author of such unnerving horror stories as The Lost Room and What Was It?, whose true themes and concerns twenty-first century readers, accustomed to reading gay fiction, will not miss. Unrivaled in its range and textual authority, the anthology includes biographies of each writer, a chronology of writers and the American short story from to , and extensive notes.