Great American Short Stories

by Various (Introduction)

A dazzling collection of short stories, including  And many more. This edition also features an introduction by Jane Smiley.

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories, Classics

704 pages, Paperback

Published May 24, 2021

About the author

Various is the correct author for any book with multiple unknown authors, and is acceptable for books with multiple known authors, especially if not all are known or the list is very long (over 50).

If an editor is known, however, Various is not necessary. List the name of the editor as the primary author (with role "editor"). Contributing authors' names follow it.

Note: WorldCat is an excellent resource for finding author information and contents of anthologies.

Reviews

[Jacob · Rating 5 out of 5]

A long book of short stories. Well worth its length because of how magnificent each short story is. Some of the ones that really stood out were Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Minister’s Black Veil, Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell Tale Heart, Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener, Mark Twain’s The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, Sarah Orne Jewett’s A White Heron, O. Henry’s The Ransom of Red Chief and The Gift of the Magi, Jack London’s To Build a Fire, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Bernice Bob’s Her Hair and The Diamond as Big as the Ritz.

That I can list this many short stories in the book which stood out to me, that I left out many great ones in this list, that the list is so diverse, and that authors spanning different centuries, who wrote as early the 1800’s and as recently as the 1920s, have all found their way onto that list, should tell you plenty about the book containing all the stories in that list and more.

This book dispenses just as much American culture and attitude as Tocqueville’s Democracy in America or as Melville’s Moby Dick, or as Whitman’s Leaves of Grass or as Twain’s The Adventures Huckleberry Fin does. Taken together, these short stories should be as much an American classic as those American Classics. That’s good enough reason for me to read it, and if you want to read an American classic, it should also be good enough reason for you!

[Ali Sturdivant · Rating 2 out of 5]

There are admittedly a few good short stories in here, but for the most part it’s pretty much just a bunch of insignificant, borderline tedious reads.