SOURCE: Fagin, N. Bryllion. “The Short Story as a Reflection of American Life.” In America Through the Short Story, edited by N. Bryllion Fagin, pp. 3-19. Boston: Little Brown, 1936.

In the following excerpt from the introduction to his collection of American short fiction, Fagin encapsulates the nineteenth-century development of the short story in the United States, detailing a variety of social, economic, and literary influences on the form.

The Short Story

Definitions are dangerous. The short story has been defined and re-defined in “exact” terms, as if it were a rigid mold instead of the subtle pattern of a highly fluid art. Teachers, critics, and even literary historians have written books which teem with rules and laws for the writing and study of short stories, in spite of the fact that hardly a representative group of short stories, American or European, can be assembled which does not in...