Authors

Ambrose BiercePost–Civil War America · American

Ambrose Bierce (1842–c. 1914) fought through some of the worst battles of the American Civil War — Shiloh, Chickamauga, Kennesaw Mountain, where he took a bullet to the head — and then spent four decades as the most feared journalist in San Francisco. "Bitter Bierce," they called him, and his Devil's Dictionary remains the sharpest book of cynicism in English. His war stories are something else entirely: precise, hallucinatory, and decades ahead of their time in technique. No American wrote better about how time behaves at the moment of death. In 1913, in his seventies, he rode into revolutionary Mexico to see the war and was never heard from again — an ending he might have written himself.

Charlotte Perkins GilmanProgressive Era · American

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) was a lecturer, economist, and one of the most influential feminist intellectuals of her generation — and the author of one of the most unsettling short stories in American literature. After the birth of her daughter she suffered a severe depression, for which the era's leading nerve specialist prescribed the "rest cure": no work, no writing, as little intellectual life as possible. The treatment nearly destroyed her, and she turned the experience into "The Yellow Wallpaper" — part ghost story, part case study, entirely indictment. Gilman went on to write Women and Economics and to edit her own magazine, The Forerunner, writing nearly all of it herself. She always insisted the story wasn't literature but advocacy; it has survived as both.

Edgar Allan PoeAmerican Romanticism · American

Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) practically invented the modern short story — and the detective story, and a good deal of horror as we know it. Orphaned young, expelled from West Point, perpetually broke, he made his living as a magazine editor and critic of legendary severity while producing the tales and poems that would outlast everyone who underpaid him. Poe argued that a short story should be built backward from its final effect, every sentence aimed at a single emotional impact — and his own stories are the proof. The dread in them is architectural: confined spaces, unreliable narrators, obsessions that tighten like a vice. He died at forty under circumstances that remain unexplained, which he would probably have appreciated.

Herman MelvilleAmerican Renaissance · American

Herman Melville (1819–1891) went to sea as a young man, turned his adventures into bestselling travel narratives, and then wrote Moby-Dick — which ended his popularity almost overnight. The masterpieces that followed were met with bafflement, and by the 1860s he was working as a customs inspector on the New York docks, his books out of print. "Bartleby, the Scrivener," written in the bitter aftermath of Moby-Dick's failure, is his great short story: a Wall Street lawyer confounded by a copyist who simply "would prefer not to." It reads today as eerily modern — the first great story of the office, of passive resistance, of the limits of charity. Melville died forgotten; the twentieth century made him central.

O. HenryGilded Age America · American

O. Henry was the pen name of William Sydney Porter (1862–1910), the most popular American short-story writer of his day and still the byword for the twist ending. He came to fiction late and sideways — pharmacist, draftsman, bank teller, fugitive in Honduras, and finally federal prisoner in Ohio, where he began publishing stories to support his daughter. Out of prison he moved to New York, and the city became his subject: shopgirls, clerks, con men, and couples scraping by in furnished rooms. At his peak he wrote a story a week for the New York World, and the best of them — compact, wry, engineered to snap shut in the final paragraph — turned the surprise ending into a national institution. Critics have called him sentimental; readers have never cared. His gift was for finding, in small lives and smaller apartments, reversals that feel both impossible and inevitable.

Washington IrvingEarly American Republic · American

Washington Irving (1783–1859) was the first American writer to become famous in Europe — proof, when the young republic badly wanted it, that the New World could produce literature. Trained as a lawyer, he found his real career in satire and sketches, publishing The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. while living in England. That one book contains both "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," and with them the beginnings of the American short story: Old World folklore transplanted into Hudson Valley soil, told with an urbane wink that lets the reader choose between the supernatural and the explainable. Irving later served as U.S. Minister to Spain, but it is the Headless Horseman who keeps his name alive.