The Modern Short Story

The 1870s-1880s were also the time of another great American writer, who stood somewhat apart from the mainstream trend of realism, A remnant of the Romantic era, clearly indebted to E.A. Poe, and a predecessor and contemporary of the naturalists, the most enigmatic writer of the period was Ambrose Bierce (1842--1914?), American newspaperman, wit, satirist, and author of sardonic short stories based on themes of death and horror, whose life ended in an unsolved mystery.

Reared in Kosciusko county, Ind., Bierce became printer's apprentice on a Warsaw, Ind., paper after about a year in high school. In 1861, he enlisted in the 9th Indiana Volunteers and fought in a number of American Civil War battles, including Shiloh and Chickamauga. Seriously wounded on Kennesaw Mountain in 1864, he served until January 1865 and received a merit promotion to major in 1867.

In San Francisco, which was experiencing an artistic renaissance, he began contributing to periodicals, particularly the News Letter, of which he became editor in 1868. Bierce was soon the literary arbiter of the West Coast and published his first short story, The Haunted Valley, in 1871.

In December 1871 he married Mary Ellen Day, and from 1872 to 1875 the Bierces lived in England, where he wrote for the London magazines Fun and Figaro, edited the Lantern for the exiled French empress Eugénie, and published three books, The Fiend's Delight; Nuggets and Dust Panned Out in California (both 1872) and Cobwebs from an Empty Skull (1874).

In 1877 Bierce became associate editor of the San Francisco Argonaut but left it in 1879-1880 for an unsuccessful try at gold-mining in Rockerville in the Dakota Territory. Thereafter he continued newspaper and magazine writing. In 1913, tired of American life, he went to Mexico, then in the middle of a revolution led by Pancho Villa. His end is a mystery, but a reasonable conjecture is that he was killed in the siege of Ojinaga in January 1914.

Bierce separated from his wife, lost his two sons, and broke many friendships. As a newspaper columnist, he specialized in critical attacks on amateur poets, clergymen, bores, dishonest politicians, money grabbers, pretenders, and frauds of all sorts. His principal books deal with death, slaughter, horror and fate, and include In the Midst of Life (1891), which included some of his finest stories, such as An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, A Horseman in the Sky, The Eyes of the Panther, and The Boarded Window; Can Such Things Be? (1893), which included The Damned Thing and Moxon's Master; and The Devil's Dictionary (1906), a volume of ironic definitions, which has been often reprinted.

Despite the morbid themes of his books, Bierce was one of the finest short-story writers of the period, whose terse, mercilessly ironic style and unsentimental choice of themes make him most readable today. In his writings, he managed to prove the vitality of a powerful combination of the Romantic themes of doom and fate in the modern American context with their honest treatment from the point of view of a naturalistic scrutinizing observer. At the same time, he was the last writer with the Romantic vision in the history of American literature who finalized the tradition by bringing it to excel.

The romantic side of naturalism is represented by Jack London (1876-1916). A poor, self-taught worker from California, the naturalist Jack London had an amazing career. Despite the fact that he died at 40, he saw many sides of life as he had been a seal hunter, an oyster pirate, an explorer, a war correspondent, a gold miner, and a rich farmer. Largely self-educated, initially he adhered to socialist views, and later he claimed a kind of white racism very much in tune with the philosophy of Nietzsche, the main inspirer of naturalism.

Jack London was catapulted from poverty to fame by his first collection of short stories, The Son of the Wolf (1900), set largely in the Klondike region of Alaska and the Canadian Yukon. Other of his best-sellers, including The Call of the Wild (1903) and The Sea-Wolf (1904), made him the highest paid writer in the US of his time.

Jack London was deeply influenced by the Darwinian idea of the survival of the fittest. Not surprisingly the characters of some of his best works are animals. In his famous Call of the Wild (1903), the main character, the dog Buck, is taken from his easy life in California and brought to the frozen environment of Alaska. He survives, because he is a superior individual and in the end he returns to the world of his ancestors, becoming the leader of a pack of wolves.

In his other novels, Jack London also explores how the laws of nature govern the life of his characters. The same topic is treated in the novel The Sea Wolf (1904). Wolf Larsen, a sea captain and the villain, is not simply a man, but a superman. His knowledge of nature, supreme beauty and strength seem to make him the master of all. On one of his voyages he saves a shipwrecked intellectual, Humphrey van Veiden, his complete opposite who is unable to survive the hardships of physically demanding life of a sailor. Wolf Larsen is fascinated with this species of man that is new to him and decides to conduct an evolution experiment to see if this weakling could adapt to the world of real men. Larsen does not care about benefiting van Veiden, the latter interests him only as an object of experiment that could prove or disprove Larsen’s priorities of a Darwinist. Larsen’s convictions are defeated when he rescues a beautiful poetess, Maude Brewster, who has to choose between the two men and, for some reason, rejects the Roman god in favour of the whimpering weakling. In the end, the superman Larsen dies, making clear the author's pessimistic conviction that Roman gods would not survive in the modern society.

It seems that Jack London saw himself as a kind of superman hero, too. His autobiographical novel Martin Eden (1909) depicts the inner stresses of the American dream as London experienced them during his meteoric rise from obscure poverty to wealth and fame. Eden, an impoverished but handsome, strong, intelligent and hardworking sailor is determined to become a writer. Eventually his writing makes him rich and well-known, but Eden realizes that the woman he loves cares only for his money and fame. His despair over her inability to love causes him to lose faith in human nature. He also suffers from class alienation, for he no longer belongs to the working class, and cannot join the wealthy, whose materialistic values he despises. He sails to the South Pacific and commits suicide by jumping into the sea. Like many of the best novels of the time, this is an unsuccess story, a revelation of despair amid wealth.

Jack London wrote several collections of short stories, many novels and a number of non-fiction works. But whatever he wrote, at all times his works had all elements of good fiction: clear thinking, a sense of character, the dramatic instinct and words powerfully and slyly significant.

At the time of Jack London, naturalism inspired not only fiction writers, but social reformers as well. The turn of the century witnessed great development of the economic theory that proved that American leisure class do not produce the wealth of the nation, but simply use it. Big Business and the Bid Capitalists were becoming the bad guys of American Society. Even the President, Theodore Roosevelt recognized it in his speech of 1902 in which he stated that he would lead a war against the nation's political, economic and social evils. In politics the era became known as "the Progressive era", in newspapers and literature – 'the Muckracker era'.

Inexpensive popular magazines like Everybody's and Cosmopolitan, sent their reporters to find the wrong-doers in politics and business. The job of such journalists was to publish the truth, however unpleasant. The journalists quickly moved to books that were full of hopelessness and despair.

The most famous of the Muckrackers was Upton Sinclair (1878-1968). Unlike other Muckrackers, he believed in human goodness and was sure the society could be changed. He believed that ' the deepest instinct of the human heart is the longing for justice between man and man. ' For him muckracking was almost a religious mission.

His greatest novel, The Jungle (1906), was a successful weapon in his fight for justice. It tells the story of an immigrant family, the Redkuses, who came to America dreaming of a better life, but experience only horrors and tragedies. Sinclair shows the terrible conditions in which they work in Chicago's meat-packing industry. Jack London described this novel as "The Uncle Tom's Cabin of wage-slavery ". Indeed it had a similar effect. Millions of Americans, including the President, were shocked by its descriptions and demanded reform of America's food industry, which soon was effected. Maybe as literature The Jungle is not very satisfactory and its characters are rather flat and lifeless, but Sinclair's interest was not in his characters, but in his message and his novels’ political and social effect. All his novels are an efficient form of propaganda and a powerful instrument of social reform, but as literature they quickly got old-fashioned.

Although the novel seems to be a dominant form of prose fiction in modern times, at least equally impressive is the short story. It is a form in which American writers have distinguished themselves, and many Americans practiced short story to fill the pages of newly founded magazines. Most of the important 20th-century authors wrote at least a few excellent short stories. In former years authors spoke of trying to write the "great American novel," envisioning, apparently, a gigantic work of fiction that somehow would capture the entire American experience. Such an intention has come to seem more and more like a fond dream, as the country has grown and as modern life has become more varied. In place of the broad canvas, many writers prefer the vignette; they feel that fiction can best explore and reveal life if it does so in small, manageable units.

Some outstanding short-story writers of the period, many of whom are also important novelists, include Ring Lardner (1885-1933), Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941) and O'Henry (1862-1910).

The same cheap magazines that started the Muckracker prose, gave the world a great writer, O'Henry. During 1904-1905 he wrote one short story a week and his first collection Cabbages and Kings (1904) made him popular. Usually he took ideas for his stories from his own experiences: he lived in Texas and Сentral America, he was in prison, he loved New York (a magic place, inhabited by 'four million mysterious strangers ') and knew how to describe it for Americans who lived in other parts of the country. Like Mark Twain, he wrote in an easy-to-understand journalistic style, beginning his stories with action and quickly moving them towards conclusion. His stories are formed around the deep loving portraits of the lives of ordinary people and, like Twain, he takes the side of the 'little people' and the weak 'under-dogs' against the strong or the important. O’Henry’s plots often seem to be written according to a certain formula. One such formula is the 'reversal': when the action of the character produces the opposite effect from the one intended. Another formula is to keep an important piece of information from the reader until the very end to create a surprise ending.

Despite O’Henry’s huge popularity with lay readers of magazines whom he often described in his stories, critics hated O'Henry. They claimed that there was not a single recognizable character in his stories, and even O'Henry himself wrote once that he was a failure and that his stories did not satisfy him. But it surely was a momentary weakness of a hard-working writer. O’Henry was the writer who sympathetically introduced the main character of modern prose – a lay working urban dweller, the ‘little man’ that would later be immortalized by Charlie Chaplin. His short stories combine shrewd insight into the desires, disappointments, and loneliness of the low-middle class with superb commonsensical erudition and the chattering neurotic style of the coming XXth centrury.

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