The literary history of all nations and cultures is founded on the short story. Although the novel ultimately may be lauded as the pinnacle of an individual author's literary achievement, the short story is the writers’ stepping stone to mastering their craft, and all renowned novelists have honed their skills and developed their singular styles through producing short fiction. The once flourishing literary journals presented the short works of writers who would find permanence or fade to obscurity, so it has been the short story that proved the gauntlet that defined the literary artists of each generation. Many of the writers presented in this volume gained initial fame in such publications. While many were bound for glory in both the long and short form, many 19th-century masters represented in this collection continued to create short fiction after launching successful careers as novelists.

For students running the gamut from grammar-school fledglings through doctoral candidates, the short story retains its relevance as a learning tool throughout the course of education. The same holds true for the writer. The short story is the classroom of both the author producing the work and the student studying the finished product. Children learn reading through what essentially amounts to illustrated short stories: even the most rudimentary volumes with a single word adorning each page qualify. Thus, the short form is as ingrained in our literary DNA as eye color in the human genome.

Noted American literary scholar Malcolm Cowley, outlined what he asserted were the stages of short story creation from the germination of the original idea to the finished product in an interview with The Paris Review. Cowley's take is interesting because it's more concerned with the emotion and psychological preparation involved rather than the physical act:

The stories covered in this volume are an amalgam of 19th- and 20th-century examples from the top authors producing short fiction in their respective times. The 19th century is of particular interest as the period in which American fiction began to take form. Despite its hard-won independence, Americans continued to look to England and the continent for its artistic leads in the post-Revolutionary period and into the early 1800s. Britain remained the center of English-language publishing, and while America had a thriving market for newspapers, pamphlets, and journals, those outlets were almost exclusively the kingdom of nonfiction with a smidge of poetry as the only form of creative writing. Fiction publishing was almost a nonentity as American authors had yet to find a voice.

Most scholars accept Washington Irving's The Sketch Book, published in installments throughout 1819 and 1820, as the first popular short story collection by an American author, although, ironically, the stories and essays in the volume were written in England and are dominated by English themes. However, the collection also contained the distinctly American tales Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, two classics still widely read today. Their vast popularity proved that an American market for short fiction was possible although it would be several more years before it fully flourished.

In 1837 Nathaniel Hawthorne assembled the short stories he’d previously published individually to little avail for a collection dubbed Twice Told Tales. Born and raised in New England, Hawthorne wore the yoke of Puritanism that prevailed throughout the Northeast. The majority of his well-known stories concern sin and guilt, recurring themes which crescendo in his most famous work The Scarlet Letter (1850). Hawthorne's sea captain father died when he was young, leaving the family with the ample financial resources to allow Nathaniel to pursue a writing career after graduating college without ever laboring in a profession. He toiled for years in near monkish seclusion writing and honing his fiction while developing his themes and perfecting his style. Scholars believe that he published stories under pseudonyms while continuing to refine the texts until he could improve them no further and burning the earlier, imperfect drafts. The Minister's Black Veil, covered in this volume, is among his initial successes. Steeped in Puritanism, the story, which Hawthorne labels “A Parable,” follows the Reverend Mr. Hooper's donning of a black veil covering all but his mouth and chin and the exaggerated turmoil it creates in the community. The veil seems symbolic of the sin we all possess, and while Hooper wears his openly (acknowledging his sin), those around him are oblivious to the invisible veils they wear themselves.

Although a contemporary of Hawthorne, Poe—alcoholic, addicted to gambling, and worldly—was the austere New Englander's antithesis. As Hawthorne's stories are sermons in morality, Poe wrote to entertain his audience. His tales of the macabre riveted readers, and he is accepted as the father of the mystery; the most prestigious award bestowed to works in that genre by the Mystery Writers of America bears his name and likeness—the Edgar. Like Hawthorne, Poe also lost his father at a young age but was adopted by a wealthy family. Raised as a gentleman, he initially pursued a military career including several years attending West Point. Poe's stepfather, however, later remarried, dashing Edgar's chances of inheriting the family fortune and forcing him to struggle through a string of odd jobs that proved as unsuccessful as his military endeavors. Poe also spent much time in seclusion perfecting his craft.

Hawthorne's The Minister's Black Veil and Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart, one of the many Poe creations covered here, are as opposite as their creators, yet close analysis reveals similarities. Hawthorne's Reverend Hooper's decision to hide his eyes from humanity propels the story, while the nameless old man in Poe's murder story loses his life solely because he “had the eye of a vulture—a pale blue eye, with a film over it.” Both characters seemingly are innocents who have done nothing to warrant their fates and have been harshly judged by others for their physical appearance. Scholars assert that Hooper's veil is a symbol of his sin-deformed soul, while the old man's deformity is physical. But if the eyes are the window of the soul, as popular adage suggests, perhaps the old man's spirit is as corrupt as his orb.

Zora Neale Hurston is one of ten women writers included in this volume. Her short story Sweat was published in 1926 in the only issue ever produced of Fire, a planned quarterly magazine for young African-American writers. Sweat was never collected in an anthology or republished during the author's lifetime (1891–1960). Hurston brings authenticity to the story about the decaying marriage of a woman and her abusive, philandering husband through dialogue written in vernacular and the use of real locations like Joe Clarke's store where Hurston herself shopped. Protagonist Delia Jones initially seems the typical weak, cowering woman afraid of her brutal husband, Sykes. Readers, however, quickly discern that Sykes has lost his power to dominate his wife. In the story's opening scene, Delia is separating the washing she takes in to earn her living when Syke's drops his coiled up bullwhip on her shoulders. Thinking it is a snake, which she deathly fears, “a great terror [takes] hold of her” and it is “a full minute” before she realizes her husband's vicious joke. Although it appears that Sykes dominates his wife, Hurston describes the whip, long the instrument of black suppression, as “long, round, limp and black,” giving it phallic overtones: Sykes has been Delia's oppressor for years, but she has found a new strength and self-worth rendering Sykes impotent and powerless.

Although not a sermon in the manner of Hawthorne, Sweat has distinct religious symbolism. Syke's attempt to drive away Delia by bringing a real snake into her house is replete with Biblical overtones that Hurston makes obvious by having the woman refer to the serpent as “ol’ satan” and “ol’ scratch.” And like the narrator of Poe's tale who seals his own fate by confessing his crime to the police, Sykes also is the author of his own demise as the viper ultimately kills him instead of Delia. Also remarkably reminiscent of The Tell-Tale Heart, Delia's final vision of the dying Sykes is his “open eye shining.” The themes presented by Poe and Hawthorne in the 1800s still flourished in 20th-century short stories. However, Sweat is an excellent illustration of how 20th-century fiction became distinctly American. Both Hawthorne's The Minister's Black Veil and Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart could as easily be set in England or Europe, while Hurtson's use of ethnic dialogue roots her story firmly in the soil of the American South.

Hurston introduces another facet into the story as does Jack London in To Build a Fire, included in this volume: place and its physical elements as an integral factor of the short form. Not just the purview of novels, location can play a paramount role in setting the mood and tone in short fiction as well. Several authors are so connected to a single location that the geometry becomes a character. This perhaps is best personified by James Joyce's use of Dublin, Ireland, as the setting for all his writings—his sole short story collection isn’t called Dubliners because he failed to conjure another title! Setting often gives a story or a novel its personality. While this is more prevalent in the alternate worlds of science fiction and fantasy, readers of all genres need to be immediately aware of a story's setting in order to fully comprehend the author's intent.

As stated above, Poe and Hawthorne are prime examples of stories with universal settings which can broaden their appeal to a wider array of readers as the location doesn’t set the story's tone. Sweat is rich with Biblical symbolism, which the author amplifies through setting it in a stifling hot South Florida. Hurston gives readers the triple whammy of a serpent, Satanic references, and Hellish heat. London uses the Yukon's frozen landscape to set his story's mood. London, however, goes further by employing the –70F temperature as the story's antagonist and third character along with the man and the dog. The unnamed protagonist is locked in a to-the-death struggle against the murderous cold in a duel as lethal as any fought with a sword or pistol. London also utilizes an element so far not seen in the previous shorts: presenting a story completely through narration sans dialogue.

Another interesting feature of London's story is the dog. The animal is described as a “wolf-dog,” a combination of the wild and the domesticated. The “dog” easily can be seen as representing nature as London instills it with intelligence, as well as instinct: the dog understands that it's too cold to travel, a fact the man repeatedly acknowledges yet foolishly ignores. The dog is the rational, the man the irrational. At the story's conclusion, the dog survives while the man succumbs to the killing cold.

Spring-boarding into the mid 20th century, John Updike's A & P, included here, brings a new ingredient to the study of short fiction: humor. While many stories have been written solely to deliver laughs, Updike, as well as J.D. Salinger, also included in this collection, follows in the footsteps of Mark Twain and others by lacing otherwise dramatic outings with humor. It is interesting to note that Updike's story is set in a small area a few miles outside of Boston, the exact local where Hawthorne lived and arguably set his fiction. The Puritan spirit that pervaded that area clearly has departed. While Hawthorne's characters were aghast at anything in the realm of sex or immodestly, A & P delivers the sexual desire of a young man toward three equally young women who enter the supermarket where he works wearing only bathing suits that display much flesh. Although the young man never directly expresses any sexual desire, he, like London's protagonist, surrenders to the illogic although he realizes it clearly is folly that may destroy his future.

As depicted in these highlighted stories, as well as numerous others in this collection, short fiction holds all the wonders of novels. Short fiction has it all.

Michael Rogers