The Development of the American Short Story: An Historical Survey
by . New York and London: Harper & Bros. 1923. 12mo. viii + 388 pp. $2.50.
ONE may question whether the subject is worthy of the extensive treatment that Professor Pattee has given it; of the thoroughness of his work there can be no question. He has made unnecessary any further historical explorations in the field of the American short story. His volume is in effect a history of American fiction from the time of Washington Irving to the present.
The contributors to the annuals and the ladies’ books of the first half of the nineteenth century produced for the most part tales that were sentimental and unreal.
From the opening-up of the Western country resulted a number of narratives written with little constructive art yet valuable as illustrating local conditions of life.
It was left to Hawthorne and Poe to make the short story something more than a sketch, an anecdote, or a narrative; they shaped it into its modern form.
After them Lowell, as editor of the Atlantic, exerted an important influence; under his guiding hand ’a healthy realism for the first time decisively entered American fiction.'
In the subsequent decades the short story underwent various vicissitudes, well indicated by some of Professor Pattee’s chapter headings, as ‘The Era of Localized Romance,’ which was inaugurated by Bret Harte and to which Constance Fenimore Woolson, George W. Cable, and Sarah Orne Jewett were the principal contributors; ‘The Reign of Dialect,’ with the South to the fore in the persons of Charles Egbert Craddock, Joel Chandler Harris, and Thomas Nelson Page; ‘The Revolt of the ’Nineties,’ with its emphasis on ‘ veritism,’ of which Hamlin Garland and Mary E. Wilkins were the chief exponents.
Through ‘The Journalization of the Short Story’ we come at last to O. Henry, and to the handbooks that undertake to show the aspirant how short stories may be made.
Professor Pattee preserves his critical balance through all the epochs of the hundred years that he traverses. He is generous in his judgments, an open-minded and sympathetic reader of all kinds of fiction; yet he does not close his eyes to the faults of even those writers whom he most admires, and while he is not disdainful of the small fry of literature he does not exalt them unduly. He writes entertainingly, and with so much tact that the reader is never disposed to take up the cudgels for or against any of the authors with whom he deals.
ARTHUR STANWOOD PIER.
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