An Introduction to Short Stories 1925 to 2000
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Argentine short story writer Jorge Luis Borges once wrote, “Unlike the novel, a short story may be, for all purposes, essential.” With a growing reliance on realism and minimalism, authors of 20th Century short stories used their power to strip down fiction to its vital meaning. Literature can be interpreted as both a window to other lives and a mirror that reflects the readers’ own realities. Stories in this era ask the readers to consider what truths they find essential, and how that is shared in the written word.
Stories shared in this section represent fiction written by authors from 1925-2000, although some authors continue to publish into the 21st Century. These stories usher in the literary eras of Modernism and Postmodernism. The conventions of these periods are hotly debated by literary theorists and very open to interpretation.
Modernism is often described as the literary response to World War I. Authors in this era rejected the flowery descriptions and highly stylized writings of the Romantic period. Most writers heralded poet Ezra Pound’s cry to “Make it New,” embracing original and unconventional styles in their fiction. This era also saw the birth of the Harlem Renaissance, the literary flowering of African American art, literature, and culture that continues to influence literature today. Zora Neale Hurston is one of the premier authors of this era, and her short story “Sweat” is represented in this anthology. Like many female authors of color, Hurston’s work was critically ignored until Alice Walker, another notable 20th Century author represented in this anthology, rediscovered her work and introduced it to the public. Walker’s “Everyday Use” continues Hurston’s rich investigation of human relationships and cultural legacies.
The late 20th Century saw the rise of Postmodernism, a historical era that reimagined the possibilities of art and collapsed the tensions between high and low culture. As Randall Stevenson writes in Modernist Fiction, "Postmodernism extends Modernist uncertainty, often by assuming that reality, if it exists at all, is unknowable or inaccessible through a language grown detached from it.” In Postmodern fiction, authors have free reign to explore the fragmentation of identity and reality in the late 20th Century. In “Happy Endings,” Margaret Atwood challenges not only the process of writing a linear short story, but the culturally defined ideals of love and success that influence us all. Likewise, Toni Morrison forces her readers to confront their own implicit biases by refusing to assign a race to her female protagonists in “Recitatif.”
Perhaps most importantly, the short fiction from this era represents an explosion of the traditional literary canon. While early fiction, and the historic academic study of literature, was dominated by middle-class white males, 20th Century literature saw a welcome and much-needed inclusion of diverse literary voices. In this anthology, you will find canonical authors like Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald represented alongside authors previously excluded from academic study like Sui Sin Far and Tillie Olsen. The authors included in this section prove that, in order for the literary world to thrive, the presence of all authors is, in fact, also essential.