Who invented the modern short story?
Who invented the modern short story? Novelist William Boyd provides a brief history of the form in Prospect magazine (via Schaub).
According to Boyd, Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales is the starting point; in Melville the modern short story “comes of age.” Perfectly plausible, except that I think Washington Irving really kicked it off. Hawthorne’s first book of stories, the unpublished Seven Tales of My Native Land, was modeled on Irving’s Sketch Book, which was a huge hit both in the U.S. and England. Irving is all over Twice-Told too.
Melville felt Irving’s stories were “too British.” He told Hawthorne that Irving was a “grasshopper” in talent compared to Hawthorne. But Irving influenced Melville nonetheless. The lawyer-narrator of “Bartleby,” for example, might have stepped right out of an Irving story, as Delbanco notes.
Read some Irving. More there than “Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle,” for sure.
I’ve always had a soft spot for old Wash. I like his response when Walter Scott offered him the editorship of a new literary magazine: “My whole course of life has been desultory, and I am unfitted for any periodically recurring task, or any stipulated labor of body or mind. I have no command of my talents, such as they are, and have to watch the varyings of my mind as I would those of a weathercock. Practice and training may bring me more into rule, but at present I am useless for regular service.”
Read Boyd as well. Including the previous piece, in which he introduces his classification system. He’s usually on the money. Although, now that I think about it, he did have Waugh completely upside down.
May 18th, 2006 07:35
Jones, the breadth of your literary knowledge never fails to astound me. I’m starting to think that you’ve been reincarnated a dozen-plus times, and in every one of your past lives you were a voracious reader. Either that, or you have a astoundingly comprehensive library of Cliffs Notes.
May 18th, 2006 13:51
Pete, you are too kind. Honestly, before I had a blog, I never realized I had all this stuff rattling around in my head. So it’s kind of news to me as well.;)
February 24th, 2008 13:33
[...] For it was late now, and everything was dark All the jokes The six-foot-four-man Keep away, keep away A porter’s knot Books for losers You must stay awake Paint me a small railroad station then The Gandhi of modern Indian literature I rejoice to concur with the common reader Who invented the modern short story? [...]
August 22nd, 2008 10:43
Here’s a bunch of fascinating stories…
“The Night Chicago Died” by Tom Wessex.
Well worth a read, particularly the one about Pontius Pilate..