About: Short Stories Old and New by Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith

SHORT STORIES OLD AND NEW

Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Shon McCarley and PG DistributedProofreaders

SHORT STORIES

OLD AND NEW

SELECTED AND EDITED

BY

C. ALPHONSO SMITH

EDGAR ALLAN POE PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH IN THEUNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA, AUTHOR OF"THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY," ETC.

1916

INTRODUCTION

Every short story has three parts, which may be called Setting orBackground, Plot or Plan, and Characters or Character. If you are goingto write a short story, as I hope you are, you will find it necessary tothink through these three parts so as to relate them interestingly andnaturally one to the other; and if you want to assimilate the best thatis in the following stories, you will do well to approach them by thesame three routes.

The Setting or Background gives us the time and the place of the storywith such details of custom, scenery, and dialect as time and placeimply. It answers the questions _When? Where?_ The Plot tells us whathappened. It gives us the incidents and events, the haps or mishaps,that are interwoven to make up the warp and woof of the story. Sometimesthere is hardly any interweaving; just a plain plan or simple outline isfollowed, as in "The Christmas Carol" or "The Great Stone Face.

" We maystill call the core of these two stories the Plot, if we want to, butPlan would be the more accurate. This part of the story answers thequestion _What_? Under the heading Characters or Character we study thepersonalities of the men and women who move through the story and giveit unity and coherence.

Sometimes, as in "The Christmas Carol" or"Markheim," one character so dominates the others that they are merespokes in his hub or incidents in his career. But in "The Gift of theMagi," though more space is given to Della, she and Jim act from thesame motive and contribute equally to the development of the story. Inone of our stories the main character is a dog, but he is so human thatwe may still say that the chief question to be answered under thisheading is _Who?_

Many books have been written about these three parts of a short story,but the great lesson to be learned is that the excellence of a story,long or short, consists not in the separate excellence of the Setting orof the Plot or of the Characters but in the perfect blending of thethree to produce a single effect or to impress a single truth. If theSetting does not fit the Plot, if the Plot does not rise gracefully fromthe Setting, if the Characters do not move naturally andself revealingly through both, the story is a failure. Emerson mightwell have had our three parts of the short story in mind when he wrote,

All are needed by each one; Nothing is fair or good alone.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

I. ESTHER, From the Old Testament

II. THE HISTORY OF ALI BABA AND THE FORTY ROBBERS, From "The Arabian Nights"

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148