Short Stories Old and New

Short Stories Old and New

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Short Stories Old and New
Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith This eBook is for the use of
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Title: Short Stories Old and New
Author: Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
Release Date: December 17, 2003 [EBook #10483]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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SHORT STORIES

OLD AND NEW

SELECTED AND EDITED
BY
C. ALPHONSO SMITH
EDGAR ALLAN POE PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH IN THE
UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA, AUTHOR OF "THE AMERICAN
SHORT STORY," ETC.

1916

INTRODUCTION
Every short story has three parts, which may be called Setting or
Background, Plot or Plan, and Characters or Character. If you are going
to write a short story, as I hope you are, you will find it necessary to
think through these three parts so as to relate them interestingly and
naturally one to the other; and if you want to assimilate the best that is
in the following stories, you will do well to approach them by the same
three routes.
The Setting or Background gives us the time and the place of the story
with such details of custom, scenery, and dialect as time and place
imply. It answers the questions When? Where? The Plot tells us what
happened. It gives us the incidents and events, the haps or mishaps, that
are interwoven to make up the warp and woof of the story. Sometimes
there is hardly any interweaving; just a plain plan or simple outline is
followed, as in "The Christmas Carol" or "The Great Stone Face." We
may still call the core of these two stories the Plot, if we want to, but
Plan would be the more accurate. This part of the story answers the
question What? Under the heading Characters or Character we study

the personalities of the men and women who move through the story
and give it unity and coherence. Sometimes, as in "The Christmas
Carol" or "Markheim," one character so dominates the others that they
are mere spokes in his hub or incidents in his career. But in "The Gift
of the Magi," though more space is given to Della, she and Jim act from
the same motive and contribute equally to the development of the story.
In one of our stories the main character is a dog, but he is so human
that we may still say that the chief question to be answered under this
heading is Who?
Many books have been written about these three parts of a short story,
but the great lesson to be learned is that the excellence of a story, long
or short, consists not in the separate excellence of the Setting or of the
Plot or of the Characters but in the perfect blending of the three to
produce a single effect or to impress a single truth. If the Setting does
not fit the Plot, if the Plot does not rise gracefully from the Setting, if
the Characters do not move naturally and self-revealingly through both,
the story is a failure. Emerson might well have had our three parts of
the short story in mind when he wrote,
All are needed by each one; Nothing is fair or good alone.

CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
I. ESTHER, From the Old Testament
II. THE HISTORY OF ALI BABA AND THE FORTY ROBBERS,
From "The Arabian Nights"
III. RIP VAN WINKLE, By Washington Irving
IV. THE GOLD-BUG, By Edgar Allan Poe
V. A CHRISTMAS CAROL, By Charles Dickens

VI. THE GREAT STONE FACE, By Nathaniel Hawthorne
VII. RAB AND HIS FRIENDS, By Dr. John Brown
VIII. THE OUTCASTS OF POKER FLAT, By Bret Harte
IX. MARKHEIM, By Robert Louis Stevenson
X. THE NECKLACE, By Guy de Maupassant
XI. THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING, By Rudyard Kipling
XII. THE GIFT OF THE MAGI, By O. Henry

SHORT STORIES

I. ESTHER[*]
[* From the Old Testament, Authorized Version.]
AUTHOR UNKNOWN
[Setting. The events take place in Susa, the capital of Persia, in the
reign of Ahasuerus, or Xerxes (485-465 B.C.). This foreign locale
intensifies the splendid Jewish patriotism that breathes through the
story from beginning to end. If the setting had been in Jerusalem,
Esther could not have preached the noble doctrine, "When in Rome,
don't do as Rome does, but be true to the old ideals of home and race."
Plot. "Esther" seems to me the best-told story in the Bible. Observe