The Best American Humorous Short Stories | Page 8

Aromatic Uncle (August, 1895, Scribner's), The Time-Table
Test (in The Suburban Sage, 1896). He collaborated with Prof. Brander
Matthews in several stories, notably in The Documents in the Case
(Sept., 1879, Scribner's Monthly). His best collections are: Short Sixes:
Stories to be Read While the Candle Burns (1891), More Short Sixes
(1894), and Love in Old Cloathes, and Other Stories (1896).
After Poe and Hawthorne almost the first author in America to make a
vertiginous impression by his short stories was Bret Harte. The wide
and sudden popularity he attained by the publication of his two short
stories, The Luck of Roaring Camp (1868) and The Outcasts of Poker
Flat (1869), has already been noted.[7] But one story just before Harte
that astonished the fiction audience with its power and art was Harriet
Prescott Spofford's (1835- ) The Amber Gods (January and February,
1860, Atlantic), with its startling ending, "I must have died at ten
minutes past one." After Harte the next story to make a great sensation
was Thomas Bailey Aldrich's Marjorie Daw (April, 1873, Atlantic), a
story with a surprise at the end, as had been his A Struggle for Life
(July, 1867, Atlantic), although it was only Marjorie Daw that attracted
much attention at the time. Then came George Washington Cable's
(1844- ) "Posson Jone'," (April 1, 1876, Appleton's Journal) and a little
later Charles Egbert Craddock's (1850- ) The Dancin' Party at
Harrison's Cove
(May, 1878, Atlantic) and The Star in the Valley
(November, 1878, Atlantic). But the work of Cable and Craddock,
though of sterling worth, won its way gradually. Even Edward Everett
Hale's (1822-1909) My Double; and How He Undid Me (September,

1859, Atlantic) and The Man Without a Country (December, 1863,
Atlantic) had fallen comparatively still-born. The truly astounding short
story successes, after Poe and Hawthorne, then, were Spofford, Bret
Harte and Aldrich. Next came Frank Richard Stockton (1834-1902).
"The interest created by the appearance of Marjorie Daw," says Prof.
Pattee, "was mild compared with that accorded to Frank R. Stockton's
The Lady or the Tiger? (1884). Stockton had not the technique of
Aldrich nor his naturalness and ease. Certainly he had not his
atmosphere of the beau monde and his grace of style, but in
whimsicality and unexpectedness and in that subtle art that makes the
obviously impossible seem perfectly plausible and commonplace he
surpassed not only him but Edward Everett Hale and all others. After
Stockton and The Lady or the Tiger? it was realized even by the
uncritical that short story writing had become a subtle art and that the
master of its subtleties had his reader at his mercy."[8] The publication
of Stockton's short stories covers a period of over forty years, from
Mahala's Drive (November, 1868, Lippincott's) to The Trouble She
Caused When She Kissed (December, 1911, Ladies' Home Journal),
published nine years after his death. Among the more notable of his
stories may be mentioned: The Transferred Ghost (May, 1882,
Century), The Lady or the Tiger? (November, 1882, Century), The
Reversible Landscape (July, 1884, Century), The Remarkable Wreck of
the "Thomas Hyke" (August, 1884, Century), "His Wife's Deceased
Sister" (January, 1884, Century), A Tale of Negative Gravity
(December, 1884, Century), The Christmas Wreck (in The Christmas
Wreck, and Other Stories, 1886), Amos Kilbright (in Amos Kilbright,
His Adscititious Experiences, with Other Stories, 1888), Asaph (May,
1892, Cosmopolitan), My Terminal Moraine (April 26, 1892, Collier's
Once a Week Library), The Magic Egg (June, 1894, Century), The
Buller-Podington Compact (August, 1897, Scribner's), and The
Widow's Cruise (in A Story-Teller's Pack, 1897). Most of his best work
was gathered into the collections:
The Lady or the Tiger?, and Other
Stories (1884), The Bee-Man of Orn, and Other Fanciful Tales (1887),
Amos Kilbright, His Adscititious Experiences, with Other Stories
(1888), The Clocks of Rondaine, and Other Stories (1892), A Chosen
Few (1895), A Story-Teller's Pack (1897), and The Queen's Museum,
and Other Fanciful Tales (1906).

After Stockton and Bunner come O. Henry (1862-1910) and Jack
London (1876-1916), apostles of the burly and vigorous in fiction.
Beside or above them stand Henry James (1843-1916)--although he
belongs to an earlier period as well--Edith Wharton (1862- ), Alice
Brown (1857- ), Margaret Wade Deland (1857- ), and Katharine
Fullerton Gerould (1879- ), practitioners in all that O. Henry and
London are not, of the finer fields, the more subtle nuances of modern
life. With O. Henry and London, though perhaps less noteworthy, are
to be grouped George Randolph Chester (1869- ) and Irvin Shrewsbury
Cobb (1876- ). Then, standing rather each by himself, are Melville
Davisson Post (1871- ), a master of psychological mystery stories, and
Wilbur Daniel Steele (1886- ), whose work it is hard to classify. These
ten names represent much that is best in American short story
production since the beginning of the