A short history of the short story

Before print: oral tales and frame collections

Short narratives are older than any written definition of the short story. A general reference work traces short stories back to oral storytelling traditions, which produced epics such as the Ramayana, the Mahabharata and Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. It adds that many Roman anecdotes were later collected in the Gesta Romanorum in the thirteenth or fourteenth century. The sources describe the oral stage only in general terms, and no firm date can be given for when the first short tale was told.^[1]

The collections that reference works treat as an early written form used a frame story. In the Decameron, thought to have been written between 1348 and 1353, seven women and three men leave plague-stricken Florence for a villa and each evening members of the group tell a tale. The work had wide influence: Marguerite de Navarre's Heptameron is heavily based on it. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is named alongside it as a collection of individual stories within a frame.^[2][1]

The nineteenth-century emergence

A general reference work says the modern form emerged in the early nineteenth century. It lists Heinrich von Kleist, whose collection of 1810 and 1811 is described as the first collection of short stories in Germany, and E. T. A. Hoffmann, whose The Nutcracker and the Mouse King appeared in 1816. It also credits Washington Irving with some of the first short stories of American origin, including Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.^[1]

Nathaniel Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales (1837) is listed among the early American collections. The sources do not agree on one founder of the modern story, and the reference work offers several writers from different countries as early examples. This guide therefore names none as the inventor of the form, only as important early practitioners whose dates can be checked. Readers who want the earliest examples should treat any single claim to be first with caution, since the reference work itself presents a spread of dates and countries.^[1]

Poe, Hawthorne and the theory of a single effect

Poe set out an influential argument for the form. In his review of Hawthorne's collection he praised the tale that can be read in one sitting and held that every element should serve a single, pre-planned effect. A general reference work says his technique of the single effect has had tremendous influence on the formation of the modern short story, and that the one-sitting definition was most notably made in his 1846 essay The Philosophy of Composition.^[3][1]

The critic Brander Matthews published The Philosophy of the Short-Story in 1884, and a reference work says that in the same year he was the first to name the emerging genre short story. That article tags the claim as having failed verification, so it should be treated as a common attribution and not a settled fact. What can be said safely is that the title of his essay shows the term was in use as the name of a form by 1884.^[1]

Maupassant and Chekhov

Guy de Maupassant lived from 1850 to 1893 and wrote 300 short stories. His story Boule de Suif appeared in 1880, and Gustave Flaubert, who acted as a kind of literary guardian to him, is credited with teaching him a concise and measured style. One literary theorist places him alongside Chekhov, calling him the greatest master of the short story in world literature, a judgement that is an opinion and not a measurable fact.^[4]

Anton Chekhov (1860 to 1904) is associated with realism, and one source records that he is said to be the father of the modern short story. A general reference work gives The Bet (1889), Ward No. 6 (1892) and The Lady with the Dog (1899) as examples of his stories. The article on Maupassant also calls him a father of the modern short story, a reminder that such labels are honorific and not the result of historical proof.^[5][1][4]

Magazines, modernism and prize recognition

Periodicals gave the story a market. A general reference work says that in 1890s Britain The Strand Magazine and other literary periodicals popularised the short story, and that in the first half of the twentieth century American magazines including The Atlantic Monthly and The Saturday Evening Post published short stories in each issue. It also names Joyce's Dubliners (1914) and the concise style of Ernest Hemingway, and says the artistic range and number of short-story writers grew significantly after the Second World War.^[1]

Prize recognition came later and remains uneven. The Nobel Prize press release of 10 October 2013 announced that the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2013 was awarded to Alice Munro, master of the contemporary short story, a phrase the Swedish Academy used of her. A reference work describes her as the first writer of nothing but short stories to win it. She had earlier received the Man Booker International Prize in 2009.^[6][7][1]