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Updated: September 2, 2025
Howells's "Their Wedding Journey" and Miss Howard's "One Summer" are Novelettes, although an American editor, who had offered a prize for a list of the ten best Short-stories, allowed them to be included. Mr. Anstey's "Vice Versa," Mr. Besant's "Case of Mr. Lucraft," and Mr.
On the other hand, most of the mature men who have been wise enough to do the latter, have shown themselves incapable of focussing their minds steadily upon a single point of experience. Wholeness and steadiness of vision few are the men who, like Sophocles, have possessed them both. The same author, therefore, has almost never been able to write great short-stories and great novels.
It may be remarked also that there is a certain likeness between vers de société and Short-stories: for one thing, both seem easy and are hard to write. And the typical qualifications of each may apply with almost equal force to the other: vers de société should reveal compression, ingenuity, and originality, and Short-stories should have brevity and brilliancy.
In his very interesting paper on "The Philosophy of Composition," Edgar Allan Poe outlined step by step the intellectual processes by which he developed the structure of "The Raven," and fashioned a finished poem from a preconceived effect. It is greatly to be regretted that he did not write a similar essay outlining in detail the successive stages in the structure of one of his short-stories.
Undue brevity is just as exceptionable here as in the poem; but undue length is yet more to be avoided." =The Formula of Brander Matthews.= From the very outset, the currency of Poe's short-stories was international; and his concrete example in striving for totality of impression exerted an immediate influence not only in America but even more in France.
If we should select at random a hundred brief tales from the best contemporary magazines, we should find, of course, that a larger proportion of them would fulfil the definition; but it is almost certain that the majority of them would still be stories that merely happen to be short, instead of true short-stories in the modern critical sense.
In no class of writing are neatness of construction and polish of execution more needed than in the writing of vers de société and of Short-stories. The writer of Short-stories must have the sense of form, which Mr. Lathrop has called "the highest and last attribute of a creative writer." The construction must be logical, adequate, harmonious. Here is the weak spot in Mr.
It is therefore not surprising that although the great novels of the world have been written for the most part by men over forty years of age, the great short-stories have been written by men in their twenties and their thirties. Mr. Kipling wrote two or three short-stories which are almost great when he was only seventeen.
Most of the English short-stories, previous to those written by James Hogg, are either prefaced with a biography of their main characters or else the biography is made to do service as though it were a plot nothing is left to the imagination.
No better type of detective story has been written than the two short-stories, The Murders in the Rue Morgue and The Purloined Letter. Every emotion is subject to the call of the short-story. Humor with its expansive free air is not so well adapted to the short-story as is pathos.
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