[Great American Short Stories]

[9781435136588]

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Great American Short Stories

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Great American Short Stories

Introduction and Notes by Jane Smiley

From Washington Irving (1783–1859) to F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940), the authors represented in this expansive American short story anthology invite you to see the world as they saw it.

Irving’s culture-defining tales of American life—“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle”—offer a turn of events that both surprises and chills the reader. In “Bartleby,” Herman Melville introduces us to a lawyer whose easy way of life is upended by a mysterious new clerk who denies his authority, perplexes his visitors, and scandalizes his professional reputation. The title character of “Athénaïs,” by Kate Chopin, is a new wife who rebels against the submissive role expected of her by her parents and husband. In Willa Cather’s “The Sculptor’s Funeral,” a young man accompanies the body of his friend and mentor from New York to the renowned artist’s hometown where no one ever understood him. And Fitzgerald’s “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” reveals the treachery of a wealthy man protecting his fortune.

Also among the thirty-four stories included in this collection are Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown,” Mark Twain’s “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Caleveras County,” Bret Harte’s “The Outcasts of Poker Flat,” Henry James’s “The Real Right Thing,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi,” Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat,” and Sherwood Anderson’s “The Egg.”

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“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” by Washington Irving

The dominate spirit, however, that haunts this enchanted region, and seems to be commander-in-chief of all the powers of the air, is the apparition of a figure on horseback without a head. It is said by some to be the ghost of a Hessian trooper, whose head had been carried away by a cannonball, in some nameless battle during the revolutionary war; and who is ever and anon seen by the country folk, hurrying along in the gloom of night, as if on the wings of the wind.

—from Great American Short Stories

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