novel.

The short story may be read at a single sitting. It is a distinct type
of literature; that is, it is not just a novel made short or condensed;
it is in its inner plan of a wholly different nature. It relates only
some single important incident or a closely related series of events,
taking place usually in a short space of time, and acted out by a
single chief character. It is like a cross section of life, however,
from which one may judge much of the earlier as well as the later life
of the character.

Its History. The idea of the short story is a decidedly modern
conception. It was in the first half of the last century that Edgar
Allan Poe worked out the idea that the short story should create a
single effect. In his story, "The Fall of the House of Usher," for
example, the single effect is a feeling of horror. In the first
sentence of the story he begins to create this effect by words that
suggest to the reader's imagination gloom and foreboding. This he
consciously carries out just as an artist creates the picture of his
dreams with many skillful strokes of his brush. Poe gave attention also
to compressing all the details of the plot of the story instead of
expanding them as in a long story or novel. He believed, too, that the
plot should be original or else worked out in some new way. The single
incident given, moreover, should reveal to the imagination of the
reader the entire life of the chief character. Almost at the same time,
Nathaniel Hawthorne, with a less conscious effort to create a single
effect, based his tales upon the same ideas, with a tendency towards
romance.

In the latter part of the nineteenth century, Guy de Maupassant, a
French author without acquaintance with the work of the American
writers, conceived the same idea of the short story, adding to it the
quality of dramatic effect; that is, the idea that the single main
incident should appeal to the imagination of the reader just as if it
were a little play presented to him.

Bret Harte followed in this country with short stories that brought
out, less precisely, the same idea of the short story, with the
addition of local color, the atmosphere of California and the West.

Rudyard Kipling, who became a master of the technique of the short
story in England, has colored his stories with the atmosphere of India
and the far East, while O. Henry, the American master, has given us
character types of the big cities, particularly of New Yo