Pathfinder: The Short Story

Scope|Overview Sources|Subject Headings|Circulating Books|Periodicals, Journals & Trade Publications|Specific Authors

SCOPE: 19th century short stories writers such as Herman Melville, Mark Twain,and Harte Crane brought to the literary landscape of America an appreciation for the genre of the short story, brief in form, but containing several elements equally compelling as any novel or prose ever written. Short stories can vary in style and theme, and can be mixed or matched by class, gender, or ethnicity such as women writers, Black Americans, or Native Americans (Gelfant, The Columbia Encylopedia to the Twentieth Century American Short Story). The purpose of this pathfinder is to serve as a guideline for student research. It is not intended as a comprehensive listing of all the resources available in the library on this topic, but as a selective sampling of the many types of resources available. The focus of this pathfinder will be on the American short story writers.

SUBJECT HEADINGS

Books dealing with short stories and writers are listed in the Baddour Library’s online catalog under the following subject headings:

Short stories, American
Authors, American—20th century
American fiction—20th century

There are sources located in the Reference Section of the Baddour Library that give a general overview or summary of the topic you are researching. The following is a list of some of the sources available in the library.

OVERVIEW SOURCES

PS 21.D5American short-story writers, 1880-1910

PS 21.D 5 American short story writers, 1910-1945

PS 21.D5 American short –story writers before 1880

PS 373.S5 C57 The Columbia companion to the twentieth-century American short story

Some representative books from the Circulating Collection located on the second floor of the library are:

CIRCULATING BOOKS

Cahill, Susan, ed. Growing up Female: Stories by Women Writers from the American
Mosaic. New York: Mentor, 1993.

Freeman, Mary Eleanor Wilkins. Selected Stories of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. New
York: W.W. Norton, 1983.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Complete Short Stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Garden City, N.Y: Doubleday & Company, 1959.

Head, Bessie. The Cardinals, with Meditations and Short Stories. Portsmouth, NH:
Heinemann, 1995.

Hurston, Zora Neale. The Complete Stories. New York: HarperCollins, 1995.

Pickering, James H. Fiction 100: An Anthology of Short Stories. New York: Macmillan, 1974.

Thomas, Dylan. The Collected Stories. New York: New Directions, 1984.

Twain, Mark. The Celebrated Jumping Frog, and Other Stories. Pleasantville, N.Y:
Reader’s Digest Association, 1992.

PERIODICALS, JOURNALS, & TRADE PUBLICATIONS

Click the link for a list of full text journals available through our databases in:

• American Literature

WEB SITES

Voice of the Shuttle
http://vos.ucsb.edu

Literary Resources on the Net
http://newark.rutgers.edu~jlynch/Lit/