One of Eudora Welty’s frequently anthologized stories, “Livvie” focuses on the title character, a 24-year-old AfricanAmerican woman whose old and ill husband, Solomon, lies dying in their home. Solomon had married Livvie when she was 16, and, although the narrator… Read More ›
Pressured by his publisher, McClure, to write more Civil War works after the success of his novel The Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane crafted with some difficulty “The Little Regiment.” The story, which Crane identified as a novelette divided… Read More ›
Originally published in the New Orleans Times-Democrat (December 20, 1896), Lilacs centers on the annual visit of an opera singer, Adrienne Farival, to the Sacré-Coeur convent school she attended in her youth. In the beginning of the story, Adrienne makes… Read More ›
Suffused with a gloom reminiscent of that of “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “Ligeia” remains one of Edgar Allan Poe’s best-known stories. It achieves Poe’s goal of the “single effect” through the narrator’s focus on Ligeia, his deceased… Read More ›
As a devout Catholic, Flannery O’Connor felt her calling in life was to convert her readers through her stories. As with many of O’Connor’s stories, in “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” readers must struggle to define what… Read More ›
Life in the Iron-Mills, an account of the squalid life, blighted aspirations, and aborted potential of the Welsh mill worker and primitive artist Hugh Wolfe, is rightly celebrated as both a powerful indictment of unrestrained industrial capitalism and a superior… Read More ›
The historical record of lesbianism in the American short story has not received the same amount and depth of attention from historians and literary critics as has that of male homosexuality. Moreover, critics still disagree about what constitutes lesbian writing…. Read More ›
Legends of the Fall is the first of Jim Harrison’s three novella collections and, as the other two, it contains narratives: Legends of the Fall, Revenge, and The Man Who Gave Up His Name. Harrison recalled, “I always loved the… Read More ›
Washington Irving’s famous opening to this story, which first appeared in The Sketch Book in 1820, evokes the dreamlike, almost mystical quality of the Hudson River Valley. It also takes the reader to Sleepy Hollow, where almost anything might have… Read More ›
Originally published in the Kenyon Review (December 1, 1950), this story depicts conflicts among cultures, genders, and generations. Miss Mari Sasagawara, the 33-year-old unmarried daughter of a Buddhist priest, is a famous Nisei ballerina who suffers the indignities of living… Read More ›
In this story, a discussion of how the political can be made all too personal takes place in the context of a thwarted love affair in the Deep South of the 1960s. Annie, the narrator whom the author invites you… Read More ›
Frank R. Stockton (1834–1902) originally entitled this story “The King’s Arena,” and after its appearance in 1882, it became the most famous story ever published in Century Magazine. Related by a caustic first-person narrator who clearly disagrees with the feudal… Read More ›
“King of the Bingo Game” registers the crisis in consciousness of an unnamed African-American man who has recently migrated to a northern city, which, he feels, does not provide the communality that his former life down South had afforded him…. Read More ›
Ernest Hemingway’s “The Killers,” first published in Scribner’s magazine in 1927 and included in his collection Men without Women, which came out later the same year, has everything the Hemingway reader wants and has come to expect. The mood is… Read More ›
Originally written and performed in 1916 as a play called Trifles, “A Jury of Her Peers” appeared in Everyweek on March 5, 1917, and became Susan Glaspell’s best-known story. On one level, readers may see it as an evocative local… Read More ›
“Jordan’s End,” which first appeared in Ellen Glasgow’s collection The Shadowy Third (1923), shows the influence of Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Fall of the House of Usher” a kinship that Glasgow acknowledged. In Glasgow’s story, the ill-fated Jordan family… Read More ›
First published in the English Review, this story, frequently interpreted in conjunction with “The Beast in the Jungle” and The Turn of the Screw, begins in medias res. Spencer Brydon, age 56, who has just returned to New York from… Read More ›
“The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” was the first of Katherine Anne Porter’s Texas stories, all drawn from persistent memories of her own impoverished and motherless childhood as well as from her memories of her sternly rigorous and religious grandmother, Catherine… Read More ›
One of the most frequently anthologized of Bernard Malamud’s stories, “The Jewbird,” from the 1963 collection Idiots First, with its original blending of magical realism and humor to demonstrate the serious effects of bigotry and hatred, rarely fails to elicit… Read More ›
“I Want to Know Why” is a coming-of-age story by Sherwood Anderson that first appeared in November 1919 in H. L. Mencken’s avantgarde magazine Smart Set and was later anthologized in the collection The Triumph of the Egg, published in… Read More ›
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