The Cultural Relevance of the Short Story
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The short story has been a fixture of American Literature nearly as long as there have been Americans creating literature in the first place. Though the genre developed earlier in Europe, the first short story published in The United States that fits modern definitions of the genre is thought to be “Somnambulism” by Charles Brockden Brown, which was published in May of 1805. For historical context, 1805 was also the final year of Thomas Jefferson’s first term as the third President of the United States and only 22 years after the end of the American Revolution. Brown’s short story was by no means the first published piece of American literature though. Many other texts were published well before, including the first collection of poetry (Anne Bradstreet’s The Tenth Muse, published in 1650) and the first novel (William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy: or, The Triumph of Nature, published in 1789). Though it wasn’t the first genre of literature to be published, the short story developed alongside major social and historical changes from the early days of post-Revolutionary War American society to the present day.
As the United States continued to grow and develop, the nineteenth century saw a parallel surge of short story production. As the number of newspapers and periodicals blossomed, there was a growing public call for short fiction. Short stories were a major form of entertainment in early America and authors used the genre to create a new national identity. Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” (1819) is an early example of an American best seller that provided both entertainment and an underlying moral message for the growing Americal culture. By the mid-1800's, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story collection Twice-Told Tales was a critical success and eventually a financial success too and helped elevate the short story to a more accepted place in the literary world. Short stories were always on the vanguard of social change as well. At the same time as Hawthorne was publishing his stories, Catharine Sedgwick, one of the first female short story writers in the United States, was publishing in a variety of genres, including the short story, and in 1859, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper published “The Two Offers,” which is the first short story published by an African-American woman author.
The short story continued to be an important form of artistic expression during major moments in U.S. history. In the mid-1890’s, in the midst of the women’s suffrage movement and 25 years before women won the right to vote in the Nineteenth Amendment, Kate Chopin was already writing controversial feminist fiction that challenged the status quo surrounding women, marriage, rearing children and domesticity. By the early 1900’s Jack London on the west coast and Stephen Crane on the east coast both created short stories that represented the experiences of large swaths of the population of the United States that simultaneously expanded westward toward cheaper, undeveloped land and into booming east coast urban centers.
The relevance and cultural value of short stories continued through the 20th century and is just as important today. Ronald Glasser’s short story collection 365 Days, which documented the experiences of American soldiers during the Vietnam War, was not written as a retrospective on the war, but instead was published in 1971 while the war was happening and four years before the Fall of Saigon. Glasser’s collection was an important contribution to the national conversation toward the end of the Vietnam War, though somewhat ironically, was at times criticized for being published so late, “now that the war is winding down,” as a review in Kirkus put it. 43 years after Americans first read through Glasser’s Vietnam War stories, Phil Klay published his short story collection Redeployment in 2014, three years after the formal end of the Iraq War, but while the American military was still very present in the country and engaged in military operations. In a reversal of 365 Days, a review by Dexter Filkins in The New York Times finds value in Klay’s comparatively late publication date: “The war in Iraq is finally over, at least for Americans, which means, in a way, that we may finally begin to comprehend it... I mean in a human sense: what the war felt like, what it did to people’s brains, how it changed the lives it did not consume. This is not, strictly speaking, the realm of journalism or history, but of fiction and memoir.” Klay’s collection was an important contribution to the conversation as Americans contemplated the significance of being engaged in two wars starting in 2001 and the spike in returning veterans from them.
More recently, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s short story collection The Refugees was published in 2017 at a painful moment when a global refugee crisis stretched from the Middle East, across Europe and to North America. In a review from NPR, Michael Schaub writes that Nguyen’s collection “takes a look at how it feels and what it means to be a refugee” and is, “an urgent, wonderful collection that proves that fiction can be more than mere storytelling — it can bear witness to the lives of people who we can't afford to forget.” Clearly, the short story has been an integral part of artistic and literary expression in the United States from its beginning and will continue to be in the future as well, even as the cultural and media landscape continues to change alongside it.