Short story

• 1. Introduction

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  A short story, Edgar Allan Poe argued, should be readable in a single sitting. He made the point most notably in his 1846 essay "The Philosophy of Composition." That one rule of thumb has shaped how generations of readers think about brief prose fiction. Yet it raises more questions than it answers. How long is a single sitting? H. G. Wells put it at fifteen to fifty minutes read aloud. The short story is one of the oldest types of literature, surviving as legend, myth, folk tale, fairy tale, tall tale, fable, and anecdote in ancient communities around the world. The modern version developed in the early 19th century. So why has a form this old, this widespread, proven so stubbornly resistant to a clean definition? Who decided what counted as a short story, and when? And how did a craft once dismissed as something writers did before their first novel come to earn a Nobel Prize?

• 2. The Trouble With Definition

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  Anton Chekhov believed a story should have neither a beginning nor an end. It should be a "slice of life," presented suggestively, with the ending left for readers to draw their own conclusions. That conviction set him sharply against writers who demanded strict architecture. Somerset Maugham insisted a short story must have a definite design with a point of departure, a climax, and a point of test. In other words, it must have a plot. Hugh Walpole shared that view, describing a story as a record of things happening, full of incidents and swift movements, leading through suspense to a climax and a satisfying denouement. William Faulkner located the form in character instead, saying a writer's job is to trot along behind the character with paper and pencil, trying to put down what he says and does. Sukumar Azhikode offered a compact formula: a brief prose narrative with an intense episodic or anecdotal effect. Flannery O'Connor pressed even on the simplest word, asking what exactly is meant by short. British author William Boyd reached past technique entirely. He said the form seems to answer something deep in our nature, as if some essence of our experience has been extrapolated, making temporary sense of our common journey toward the grave and oblivion. The word itself only acquired its modern meaning in the 1880s, having first referred to children's tales.

• 3. Counting Words

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  One thousand to four thousand words is the typical range for a short story, though some works classified as short stories reach up to 15,000. Below 1,000 words, a piece is sometimes called a "short short story" or "flash fiction." These boundaries are conventions, not laws. Short stories have no set length, and what counts as one differs between genres, countries, eras, and commentators. The form's predominant shape reflects the demands of available publishing markets. Its evolution seems closely tied to the publishing industry and the submission guidelines of its houses. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America made the line explicit for one corner of the field. In the Nebula Awards submission guidelines, a short story is defined as having fewer than 7,500 words. Longer pieces that cannot be called novels are sometimes labeled novellas or novelettes, and like short stories they may be gathered into the more marketable form of collections.

• 4. Oral Roots And Frame Tales

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  The Ramayana, the Mahabharata, and Homer's Iliad and Odyssey grew out of oral storytelling traditions that also carried shorter tales. These narratives were often told in rhyming or rhythmic verse, with recurring sections or, in Homer's case, Homeric epithets. Such devices worked as mnemonics, making a story easier to recall, perform, and adapt. While a tale's full arc unfolded across several performances, short sections of verse could focus on a single narrative the length of one telling. The Roman Empire favored a different brief form, the anecdote, a short realistic narrative that embodies a point. Many surviving Roman anecdotes were collected in the 13th or 14th century as the Gesta Romanorum. Anecdotes stayed popular across Europe into the 18th century, including the fictional anecdotal letters of Sir Roger de Coverley. India contributed not only a rich heritage of folktales but a structural innovation. The frame story, a narrative technique of a story within a story, probably originated in ancient Indian works such as the Panchatantra. Sanskrit collections like the Hitopadesha and the Kathasaritsagara gathered legends, fables, and fairy tales, while the Jataka tales, written originally in Pali, compiled stories of the previous births of Lord Gautama Buddha.

• 5. The Written Form Takes Shape

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  Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron and Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales marked Europe's move from oral telling to written form in the early 14th century. Both books gather individual short stories, ranging from farce to well-crafted literary fiction, inside a larger frame story, though not every writer adopted that device. By the end of the 16th century, some of Europe's most popular short stories were the darkly tragic novella of the Italian author Matteo Bandello, especially in French translation. France refined the brief form in the mid 17th century with the nouvelle, a short novel written by authors such as Madame de Lafayette. Charles Perrault assembled one of the most famous early fairy tale collections in the late 17th century. Antoine Galland's first modern translation of the 1001 Arabian Nights, a storehouse of Middle Eastern folk and fairy tales, appeared from 1704, with another translation following in 1710 to 1712. Galland's work would influence the 18th-century short stories of Voltaire and Diderot, among others. As printing technologies and periodical editions advanced, short story publication grew in importance. Among the writers who pioneered the genre's rules in the Western canon were Rudyard Kipling, Guy de Maupassant, Rabindranath Tagore, Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera, and Rubén Darío.

• 6. Birth Of The Modern Story

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  "The Poisoner of Montremos," Richard Cumberland's gothic tale of 1791, stands among the first short stories in the United Kingdom. Early examples were published separately between 1790 and 1810, but the first true collections appeared between 1810 and 1830 across several countries. Sir Walter Scott and Charles Dickens also wrote influential short stories during this period. Germany followed the British example, producing its first collection of short stories from Heinrich von Kleist in 1810 and 1811. Washington Irving created some of the first short stories of American origin, including "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and "Rip Van Winkle." Edgar Allan Poe became another early American writer in the form, and his concise technique, deemed the "single effect," had tremendous influence on the modern short story's formation. The years around this turn produced enduring titles. E. T. A. Hoffmann wrote "The Nutcracker and the Mouse King" in 1816, the Brothers Grimm published Grimms' Fairy Tales in 1812, and Nathaniel Hawthorne released Twice-Told Tales in 1837. Among Poe's own stories were "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "The Purloined Letter," counted among the first detective stories.

• 7. Magazines And Masters

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  Three thousand to 15,000 words became the sweet spot in the latter half of the 19th century, as print magazines and journals created strong demand for short fiction. In 1890s Britain, literary periodicals such as The Yellow Book, Black & White, and The Strand Magazine popularized the form. Guy de Maupassant produced important examples of French realism in "Boule de Suif" of 1880 and "L'Inutile Beauté" of 1890. In India, Rabindranath Tagore published more than 150 short stories about the lives of peasants, women, and villagers under colonial misrule. His contemporary Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay pioneered Bengali short fiction focused on rural Bengal, while Munshi Premchand wrote over 200 short stories in Hindustani, marked by realism and unsentimental introspection. Brander Matthews, the first American professor of dramatic literature, gave the field both a theory and a name. In 1884 he published The Philosophy of the Short-Story, and that same year he became the first to name the emerging genre the "short story." The early 20th century widened the form's reach and its moods. Saki wrote satirical stories about Edwardian England, P. G. Wodehouse introduced the valet Jeeves in a 1917 collection, and James Joyce published Dubliners in 1914. American magazines paid so well that F. Scott Fitzgerald repeatedly turned to short-story writing to settle his debts, releasing his first collection, Flappers and Philosophers, in 1920. In India, Saadat Hasan Manto wrote some 250 short stories in Urdu, including the celebrated "Toba Tek Singh," while Ismat Chughtai's 1942 story "Lihaaf" caused great controversy.

• 8. Renaissance And Recognition

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  Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery," published in 1948, drew the strongest response in The New Yorker's history to that time. After World War II, the artistic range and sheer number of short story writers grew significantly, and that magazine wielded substantial influence as a weekly short story publication for more than half a century. The decades that followed pushed the form in many directions at once. J. D. Salinger's Nine Stories of 1953 experimented with point of view and voice, Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" reinvigorated the Southern Gothic style in 1955, and minimalism gained wide influence in the 1980s through Raymond Carver and Ann Beattie. In the Spanish language, Jorge Luis Borges handled subjects like infinity in "The Library of Babel" and "The Aleph," winning American fame when "The Garden of Forking Paths" appeared in the August 1948 issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Sales tell their own story of revival. In the UK, short story sales jumped 45 percent in 2017, and more than 690,000 short stories and anthologies sold there that year, generating 5.88 million pounds, the genre's highest total since 2010. Sam Baker called the short story a perfect literary form for the 21st century. The final reversal of the form's old reputation came in 2013, when Alice Munro became the first writer of nothing but short stories to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her citation named her a master of the contemporary short story, and she said she hoped the award would recognize the short story for its own merit, rather than something people do before they write their first novel.