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Henry James was one of the most prolific of major American writers, having written more than four million words of fiction and about the same amount of nonfiction; in addition, about fifteen thousand letters are extant. Since James's fiction, whether long or short, is descriptive, pictorial, and dramatic, it is somewhat arbitrary not only to separate the work into subgenres but even to distinguish it totally from his travel writing, critical pieces, letters, and plays. In prefaces to the New York Edition of his fiction (1907-1909), and elsewhere, James tried to define various types of short fiction. For him the tale or short story (he employed the terms interchangeably) is most often a "picture" or "anecdote." Though the distinction between the anecdote and the picture is not always clearcut, the picture is the shorter of the two, and, as James noted, it is intended to create "richly summarised and foreshortened effects ...." The anecdote, James Kraft explains, "is an idea that is too complex for this small canvas of the picture, yet is only directed toward a single character and situation."
A representative "picture" is "The Chaperon" (Atlantic Monthly, November and December 1891; collected in The Real Thing and Other Tales, 1893).
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