SOURCE: Bates, H. E. The Modern Short Story: A Critical Survey, pp. 72-121. Boston: The Writer, Inc. Publishers, 1941.

In the following excerpt, Bates provides an overview of nineteenth-century European realist short fiction writers Anton Chekhov (here spelled Tchehov), Guy de Maupassant, and Leo Tolstoy.

Tchehov and Maupassant

In nineteenth-century America the short story took a series of halting steps forward, its performance rather resembling that of a child learning to walk. If at times it walked badly it could at least be said to be walking by itself; if it did not walk far it could also be said that vast continents are not explored in a day. It needs little perception to note the main defects of the American short story from Poe to Crane. It was often raw, facile, journalistic, prosy, cheap; it was unexperimental, and, except in rare instances, unpoetical. It was all these things...