Friday Fiction: Short Stories (Old School)

--by Hanje Richards


A few weeks ago, I did a blog post on contemporary short story writers. This blog is about some of their literary forefathers and foremothers. If you are a fan of the short story genre, you may enjoy looking back to some of these masters of the craft. The books listed are available at The Copper Queen Library.

William Faulkner
..Collected Stories of William Faulkner
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William Cuthbert Faulkner (September 25, 1897 – July 6, 1962) was a Nobel Prize-winning American novelist and short story writer. One of the most influential writers of the 20th century, his reputation is based mostly on his novels, novellas, and short stories. He was also a published poet and an occasional screenwriter. The majority of his works are based in his native state of Mississippi. Faulkner is considered one of the most important writers of the Southern literature of the United States, along with Mark Twain, Robert Penn Warren, Flannery O'Connor, Truman Capote, Eudora Welty, Harper Lee, and Tennessee Williams. Though his work was published as early as 1919, and largely during the 1920s and 1930s, Faulkner was relatively unknown until receiving the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature. Faulkner has often been cited as one of the most important writers in the history of American literature.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
..Babylon Revisited, and Other Stories
..Curious Case of Benjamin Button
..Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald
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Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896 – December 21, 1940) was an American author of novels and short stories, whose works are the paradigm writings of the Jazz Age, a term he coined himself. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. Fitzgerald is considered a member of the "Lost Generation" of the 1920s. He finished four novels; a fifth, unfinished, novel was published posthumously. Fitzgerald also wrote many short stories that treat themes of youth and promise along with despair and age.

Henry James
..Complete Stories, 1874-1884
..Complete Stories, 1884-1916
..Complete Stories, 1892-1898
..Complete Stories, 1898-1910
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Henry James (April 15, 1843 – February 28, 1916) was an American-born writer, regarded as one of the key figures of 19th-century literary realism. He was the son of Henry James, Sr., a clergyman, and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James. James spent the last 40 years of his life in England, becoming a British subject in 1915, one year before his death. He is primarily known for the series of novels in which he portrays the encounter of Americans with Europe and Europeans. His method of writing from the point of view of a character within a tale allows him to explore issues related to consciousness and perception, and his style in later works has been compared to impressionist painting.

Vladimir Nabokov
..Stories of Vladimir Nabokov
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Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (April 22, 1899 – July 2, 1977) was a multilingual Russian-American novelist and short story writer. Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Russian, then rose to international prominence as a master English prose stylist. He also made contributions to entomology (he was an expert on butterflies) and had an interest in chess problems. Nabokov's
Lolita (1955) is frequently cited as among his most important novels and is his most widely known, exhibiting the love of intricate word play and synesthetic detail that characterized all his works.

Flannery O’Connor
..Collected Works of Flannery O’Connor
..Everything That Rises Must Converge
..A Good Man Is Hard To Find & Other Stories
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Mary Flannery O'Connor (March 25, 1925 – August 3, 1964) was an American novelist, short-story writer and essayist. An important voice in American literature, O'Connor wrote two novels and 32 short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries. She was a Southern writer who often wrote in a Southern Gothic style and relied heavily on regional settings and grotesque characters. O'Connor's writing also reflected her own Roman Catholic faith and frequently examined questions of morality and ethics.

Eudora Welty
..Collected Stories of Eudora Welty
..Stories, Essays and Memoir
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Eudora Alice Welty (April 13, 1909 – July 23, 2001) was an American author of short stories and novels about the American South. Her book, The Optimist's Daughter, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973. Welty was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, among numerous awards, and was the first living author to have her works published by the Library of America. Her house in Jackson, Mississippi, is a National Historic Landmark and is open to the public as a museum.


Edith Wharton
..The New York Stories of Edith Wharton
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Edith Wharton, born Edith Newbold Jones (January 24, 1862 – August 11, 1937), was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, short story writer, and designer. In addition to novels, Wharton wrote at least 85 short stories. She was also a garden designer, interior designer, and taste-maker of her time. She wrote several design books, including her first published work, The Decoration of Houses (1897), co-authored by Ogden Codman & the generously illustrated Italian Villas and Their Gardens (1904).