Literary Short Story Writers 1900-1940

When I was a younger man, I couldn't be bothered with short stories, and read novels almost exclusively. Its only recently that I've dipped my toes into the waters of the literary short form. My impression is that the greatest writers of their age from late Victorian times through to about 1940 tended to write a lot of short fiction, while the novel rather eclipsed the short story post WWII and in more recent times. Its also true to say that I tend to gravitate to authors from the first 3 or 4 decades of the 20th century for some reason anyway, which encompasses many of the best authors of the form. I suppose that's a happy coincidence. I've been reading some collections of short fiction in the last few years, and have other books in my 'to be read' pile. In drawing up a list of what to read, I've concluded that the following are the authors to seek out:

• Ernest Hemingway
• Rudyard Kipling
• W. Somerset Maugham
• F. Scott Fitzgerald
• John Cheever

Of course, this is a nice enough list, but it seems to be its very short. I've googled about and tried to educate myself on who were the great short story writers between say 1900 and 1940 - and there must surely have been dozens of terrific writers of this time, but I've struggled to find other top authors that are consistently recommended. Who else should I look to read, and who do you like from this era?

Joseph Conrad
Carson McCullers
Thomas Mann
Frank Kafka
Isaac Bashivis Singer
Truman Capote

Also some of the really obvious big literary guys of the era wrote short fiction, like Faulkner and Steinbeck.

James Joyce
Jack London
Katherine Anne Porter
Eudora Welty

There are also anthologies - you get a quick exposure to numerous authors and some have historical context which will narrow things down. Some anthologies add numerous authors including

O. Henry
Henry James
D.H. Lawrence
Katherine Mansfield

There are also all kinds of authors just before or just after that timespan, of course, including Anton Chekhov and Flannery O' Connor and so on.

-- Oh yeah, and there are lists like these which might help:

The American Short Story: A Selective Chronology (including two sections covering 1900-1945)
Best Short Stories of All Time - Chronological (including a 1900-1949 section)

This is a good idea for a discussion topic, and some good choices of names are appearing, some of whom have their own headings elsewhere in the Literary Fiction area, so commenters will have to decide whether to comment here on their short fiction or under the heading of the particular author.

Thanks for the additional suggestions, several of which certainly seem to fit my criteria really well. Your link of best shot stories of all time reminded me of a couple of others that meet the brief well, J-Sun: Sherwood Anderson and George Orwell.

Extollager - indeed, there are threads for many of these authors - I suspect this will be a thread to compare authors and comment of preferences, while the individual author threads remain the place to actually discuss the works themselves.

Erskine Caldwell and Ring Lardner.

dask said:

Erskine Caldwell and Ring Lardner.

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Wow, thanks, a couple of names I would never have thought of. I looked up Caldwell, and all the photos I saw showed him smoking, and then I read he died of a lung disease. Were these considered part of the 'literary' landscape? I see they were popular...

I think so but I'm not an expert, but if another writer from the same era, Ben Hecht, can be called the Shakespeare of Hollywood then maybe they can be a little bit of both.

Not to be pointlessly picky, but, before this topic is discussed any further, should there be any discussion of what counts as a short story?
Is a work of prose fiction a short story till it becomes a novel, or do we think in terms of short story, novella/nouvelle, novel? And should there be some sort of word count approximation?

For reference, here is a list of famous stories with their word counts:

Word Counts of Famous Short Stories (organized)

This source--

Word Counts of Famous Short Stories (organized)

--suggests that a work of prose fiction becomes a novella rather than a short story at 20,000 words, and becomes a novel at 50,000 words and up.

INFOGRAPHIC: Word Counts of Famous Books — Electric Literature

It could be argued that more than just word count should be considered (although for simplicity's sake I might recommend just sticking to the quantifiable). Should the density of the prose be taken into account? Some novels might be easy to breeze through in an evening, while James's Turn of the Screw (42,211 words)

Discussion?

Extollager said:

Not to be pointlessly picky, but, before this topic is discussed any further, should there be any discussion of what counts as a short story?

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I don't feel that's necessary to be honest - though feel free to do so if you'd like. All the famous short fiction I've read is between about 5 and 30 pages. That would encompass every Wodehouse, Hemingway, Maugham, Kipling and Fitzgerald story I've ever read. Which is short, compared to novels, which always seem to be at least a hundred anf fifty pages long. It's only the listmania SF geeks that break it down into mathematical functions and subcategories isnt it? i.e people like me on SF threads...

I should add Extollager, that the links you posted are nonetheless interesting to me, and also constitute great lists of stories - a useful resource. Thanks for the links.

dask said:

Erskine Caldwell and Ring Lardner.

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Good additions. I'd also suggest Sherwood Anderson, particularly Winesburg, Ohio. Then there's Jean Toomer's Cane, also a terrific book mixing poetry, short stories and vignettes; it stems from the Harlem Renaissance.

Caldwell, by the way, was considered a literary light early on, claimed by Faulkner as one of the five finest writers in America, but at some point became (or became perceived) as going commercial -- the success of Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre appeared to push him that way. Lardner, along with Anderson, paved the way for Hemingway, themselves maybe influenced by Twain, stripping out formal language and using vernacular.

Other writers who would have straddled this time period: Max Beerbohm, Conrad Aiken and Walter de la Mare, the latter two more known at the time for their poetry, since perhaps a shade better known for their short stories. Then there's Stephen Vincent Benet, again a poet, but whose story "The Devil and Daniel Webster" has probably kept his name somewhat known.

About the end of that time period was when Jorge Luis Borges started writing, I believe.

Writers I've heard about but not read from that time: Bruno Schultz, John O'Hara, Elizabeth Bowen. I think Edith Wharton was still writing some short stories after the turn of the 20th century, too.


After thought: Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty and Robert Penn Warren must have all started writing somewhere around that time period, and all wrote short stories, though Warren may have been better known for his novels and poetry.

Randy M.

Ha! Walter de la Mare! Good one, Randy. I shoulda thought of him; but I didn't.

Thanks for all those thoughts Randy. I should have remembered Sherwood Andersen - I have (and read long ago) Winesburg, Ohio!

Coincidentally, I just received The Best American Short Stories of the Century which pulls from the annual The Best American Short Stories volumes from 1915-1999. I know there is or was a "Best English" version and surely something like it for other countries or which is not country-specific. Anyway - FWIW, the writers represented up to 1940 are the aforementioned Anderson, Lardner, Hemingway, Porter, Faulkner, Parker, Fitzgerald, Warren, and Welty and the as-yet-unmentioned Benjamin Rosenblatt, Mary Lerner, Susan Glaspell, Jean Toomer, Willa Cather, Grace Stone Coates, Dorothy Parker, Alexander Godin, William Saroyan, and Richard Wright. While Cather, Parker, Saroyan, and Wright are biggish-to-big names, Cather and Wright were known more for novels. Saroyan and Parker, at least, may be worth looking into. (I have The Portable Dorothy Parker that I may get to one day.) Of course, some of the stories presented from later years may represent authors who started between 1900-1940 but these definitely qualify.

Susan Glaspell's "A Jury of Her Peers" is excellent, as is Jean Toomer's Cane (a collection). As for Parker, I shoulda thought of her. I have that portable volume, too, and I may someday get to it, too.

I wonder if Cather doesn't fit into that group of writers who wrote the occasional short story, like Ellen Glasgow, who only published one collection that I know of.

Was the short story more popular then because there was a larger market? Were there more magazines printing short stories during this period?

Vladd67, I'm pretty sure that this period was a golden era of magazines that printed fiction. There were the pulps and there were the slicks.

This site

Home - UNZ.org

seems to provide access to many such magazines, but I haven't used it much.

Not just specialty magazines like the s.f., horror, mystery, air story, western, etc. etc. etc. pulps, but major wide-circulation magazines with a mix of contents like Collier's, The Saturday Evening Post, Liberty, Harper's, and many, many others included short fiction. This was the time when home entertainment was highly likely to be reading, although radio did intrude. This was the era when The New Yorker started. Black Mask, which became the creme de la creme of mystery/detective for a time was started by H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan as a way to make money to support the literary magazine Smart Set.

Fascinating era for readers. Really, the short story ruled, and some of the writer who wrote for pulps before WWII transferred to the slicks (the big money magazines) after the war, including Heinlein and Bradbury. Other writers who first became known through their short work: John Collier, Gerald Kersh (Collier and Kersh didn't sell to pulps), Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Jack Finney, and on and on.


Randy M.

Anyone read Stefan Zweig's novellas? He seemed to have quite a few. I just started Burning Secret.