CHAPTER V
The Writer Of Short Stories
I
The short story is recognized as the most distinctive contribution that Americans have made to national and international literature. Here if anywhere we have achieved a prestige that European critics neither deny nor begrudge. The type is the newest of all literary types and in its creation the masters are easily recognized. They are, in the order of their contributions, Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Bret Harte, Joel Chandler Harris, and O. Henry.
Irving legendized the new type, making it a means of storing legendary material in more permanent and attractive form. Hawthorne allegorized it, convert- ing it into a sort of miniature Pilgrim's Progress. Harte localized it, and California became the first romantic region that was lifted into literature on the shoulders of the short story. Harris folklorized it, the Uncle Remus stories not only bringing the folktales of the negro into literature but making possible at the same time the scientific study of negro folklore. O. Henry socialized it, leaving it the most flexible and responsive organon of social reaction that American literature has to its credit. Poe's contribution was unlike any of these. He retold no legends, he looked askance at allegory, he brought no locality into literature, he saw no career for art in folklore, and he found
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